Summary:
By defining a “page” as a portion of content – and thus defining “most popular” page as a ranked list of consumed content, it is very likely that the most popular page (as listed in your Web analytics tool) is NOT the content that is consumed the most, due to Social Media content spread and consumption.

This post is written with the Online Business Measurement Quadrant in mind. A model describing that controlled on-site measurement is simply not good enough if one wants to get a complete picture of real consumer content cunsumption, engagement, sentiment and so forth.

I will be using this analytics blog as an example to test my hypothesis – that my most popular page is very likely NOT my most popular page.

Example site and content:
Site: http://visualrevenue.com/blog

Where the immediate conclusion from my Web Analytics tool is the following:

Which of course is very much in line with what I reported for the 18 most popular web analytics post of 2007 post. Putting that into the context of the Online Business Measurement Quadrant we get the following subset of results:

Controlled On site Content
Traditional marketing messages published on the corporate website, micro websites etc.

TOP 4

• 879 views – http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/07/what-to-measure-on-social-networking.html
• 789 views – http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/03/long-tail-and-how-to-calculate-missing.html
• 587 views – http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/07/tracking-rss-subscribers-via-img-tag.html
• 437 views – http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/06/web-reporting-vs-web-analysis.html

• 1584 views – http://www.slideshare.net/dennis.mortensen/web-reporting-vs-web-analysis/
• 1025 views – http://www.slideshare.net/dennis.mortensen/indentify-increased-organic-search-traffic-opportunities-in-a-drooping-tail/
• 375 views – http://www.slideshare.net/dennis.mortensen/regional-web-analytics-level-of-advancement
• 110 views – http://indextools.com/docs/IndexTools-Reporting-vs-Analytics.pdf

• 50 views – http://pulse-beat.blogspot.com/2007/11/web-analytics-collectives-at-bcb5.html (Anil used the Web Reporting vs. Web Analysis slides, I guessed a number of views)
• 50 views – http://webanalyse-news.de/web-reporting-vs-webanalyse/ (Patrick posted about the Web Reporting vs. Web Analysis post and added commentary, I guessed a number of views)

I think it is fair to say that I probably not included all sources / measurement points, but I also think it is fair to say that I have enough to conclude on my hypothesis.

Conclusion:

What by first sight looked like the most popular page (What and how to measure Social Networking websites), using my traditional Web Analytics tool to measure Controlled On site Content – is actually not, by far, the most popular content that I produced. That would be; Web Reporting vs. Web Analysis.

2231 views – Web Reporting vs. Web Analysis
437 views – Controlled On site Content
1694 views – Controlled Off site Content
0 views – Uncontrolled On site Content
100 views – Uncontrolled Off site Content

879 views – What and how to measure Social Networking websites
879 views – Controlled On site Content
0 views – Controlled Off site Content
0 views – Uncontrolled On site Content
0 views – Uncontrolled Off site Content

It also becomes clear through my content quadrant categorization, that these choices depends very much on my vantage point – the same content can in essence qualify for all 4 quadrants (But much more about that later). Thanks to June Dershewitz for the Online Business Measurement Quadrant “vantage point” email dialogue.