It’s been a theme lately on various blogs to discuss what’s coming next in web measurement, and my new work colleague Greg Yardley puts an interesting idea out there for a metric called page share. The idea of page share is that a weighting measurement is put on the various real estate of a web page. That weighting is based on the location of the page and also it’s ability to get clicks and conversions. Greg theorizes it would then be easy to calculate how much ad units should sell for or what space is worth because if we know the total page’s CPM value, we could sell space on the page by multiplying the weighting by the total CPM value.
This concept would have worked nicely for me when I was selling a lot of direct advertising for one of my past sites. I often was arbitrarily picking prices for various ad units without really much reason behind it.
There are some difficulties though. How does one determine what the total page CPM should be? These weightings would have to be totally different per site because while an advertising heat map can generally hold true, I can tell you that the click and conversion rates vary widely from site to site. A 728×90 leaderboard at the top of one site should have a much different page share than a leaderboard on the top of another site.
Definitely interesting though, at least as a way to simplify rate cards (although one might argue that more math isn’t always simplifying things!).