Life after page views: Web analytics 2.0

Each company can create its own measurement formula with the free tool, he added. For example, a site can use the tool to measure the number of comments it generates, the number of recommendations it receives or how many links back to it from other sites it generates.

In addition, Nuconomy has created a two-way API to allow users to take the information generated from the tool and use it to make adjustments to their content.

"You can actually take the information in an automated way and create better Web experiences [and] change your business based on this information," Nechmand said. "We believe that the biggest problem in analytics today is it is completely separated from operational systems. People view analytics for the sake of analytics. If I can show you that a user is more interested in sports than technology, and if you don't do any personalization to accommodate him, it doesn't mean anything to your business."

Nuconomy plans to release a plug-in of its technology for bloggers next month. In the next two months, it plans to release a public beta of the technology. It intends to make its Web analytics tool available for free to companies with fewer than 3 million unique visitors per month, Nechmand added.

Avinash Kaushik, a Web analytics consultant whose clients include Google Inc., for its Google Analytics product, cautions that despite the death of page views, companies shouldn't blindly embrace measuring "engagement" without a deep assessment of the concrete metrics behind such an effort.

"A lot of people think the page view is dying so we should measure engagement," he noted. "Just because the page view died, who … gave you the right to move to engagement? The Web is becoming more fluid in terms of how people interact with it. The fluidity does not mean the core questions you wanted to answer go away."

Kaushik, who is also author of the book Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, pointed out that while page-view counts traditionally have been obtained by monitoring server log files and JavaScript tags, such models are limiting because they rely on a page refresh occurring.

He noted that there are other methods for analyzing the effectiveness of streaming video, Flash applications or podcasts. For example, Google's event tracking, which launched in October, can track traffic interactive elements on a site.

A site that is advertising a movie with a series of 100% Flash Web sites can use event tracking to monitor how many users downloaded a desktop widget from that site after arriving, or how many people click on a link to order tickets to the movie, Kaushik explained.