People not pages

ABC ELECTRONIC (the UK's leading auditors of internet traffic figures) has announced that Unique Users rather than Page Views will be the new mandatory metric for sites undertaking audits.

This is great on a number of levels, but mostly because Unique Users is a much more relevant metric for advertisers than Page Views, particularly in the recruitment space. Consumer advertisers might be interested in the total number of page views a site generates if they are booking banners on a CPM basis, but for recruitment advertisers it's all about the audience of the site (and this is the reason that NORAS has always used ABC E Unique User numbers, but not included Page View figures).

The next move will be for the online recruitment industry to agree a definition for 'applications' so that all sites can provide advertisers with details of their response levels as well as their audience size. We seem to be making good progress with this and hopefully it will be something we can do next year - you can read why I think this is so important here and here.