During my working period as a web analytics consultant (over 21 years since 2000) , I have a vision for my work. It is to make methodology how to calculate online traffic as an accounting of a company.
I guess it is not impossible. Online traffic is similar to money. As same as the credit is equal to the debit on the balance sheet, the acquisition pageviews(pv) is equal to the exit pageviews on website traffic.
Then if we can connect the profit with acquisition pv, we could tell the value of pageviews.
Each channel(Ads, SNS, Search, Direct etc) has a particular characteristic.
We can earn traffic from ads for the duration while we are investing quantity and time. Therefore cost per traffic is proportional to the fundamental investment, like variable cost .
However traffic from social and organic search will be earned continuously and cost per traffic is not proportional to the investment same as fixed cost.
And so on, some of the traffic like subscribers of mail news will stay like the company credit and negative posts on SNS will lose companies’ brand and opportunities like the companie’s debt.
If we can describe such system like a double entry booking ones, companies would realise the value of gain traffic and the lost of decreasing traffic, or can bring up professionals of online traffic analysts.
I hope to do that but I cannot, I’ve been working for over 20 years.