Page Views: An Important Metric to Understand

Although my knowledge of web analytics is very limited at this point, I have often come across the metric of “page views” that is categorized as a foundational analytical tool. To some extent, prior to my research, I even had a basic understanding of what the page view metric consisted of. This is therefore why I decided to further explore and gather a greater understanding of the importance of page views.

Under the most basic of definitions, a page view can simply be understood as the number of times any page on a website has been viewed. A more in depth look at the metric describes page views as, “The number of times any page on a website has been loaded in a visitor's web browser, and the analytics code has successfully recorded the fact that page was loaded,” (Louis, 2012). Louis then goes on to explain how this metric is one of the more important ones to consider as it will be the general indicator of demand for a business’s website and the relativity of the content on it.

Page views can provide much needed feedback and diagnosis of what content is working for the customer demographic and what content is not. For example, a high count of page views could indicate both good and bad scenarios for website content. A high page view count when coupled with a low amount of time spent on the website page could mean that the page visitor is not finding the content they were looking for and are subsequently searching continuously for it. (Louis, 2012) Yet a high page view count could also indicate to market research teams that the content provided on the given page is engaging to the customer. Therefore, it is important that this metric is also coupled with other metrics in order to complete the larger picture at hand. Page view metrics are only one piece to the puzzle that requires many pieces in order to fully reach a true diagnosis.  

Another metric that is commonly mistaken with page views is known as “hits,” and it is important to understand the difference and reliability between these two metrics. A hit on a website is simply known as a request to the server for a single file, with single pages therefore able to create dozens of hits which can become often misleading. According to an article on the common misconception between page views and hits, the author claims that “…the number of hits doesn’t tell you much about your Web site’s traffic. Page views, on the other hand, are a solid measurement of traffic. If you send out a marketing piece, watch the page views and not the hits. Keep your focus there and forget the hits.” (Martin, n.d.)

Below I have included a real world example provided by Shawn Roering in 2012 of the differences between hits and page views and illustrating these calculations. The tables below visually showcase two different websites (Mcafee and Youtube) whereas the first tables in this set show 79 requests (hits) for 2 web pages, the last two tables of data only show the actual number of page views. It is fascinating to see how the data can be interpreted from 79 total requests to 17 different sites and then reduced to just 2 requests, providing a much more accurate depiction of the visitor’s actions. (Roering, 2012)

References:

Louis, J. (2012, April) A Web Analytics Primer - What Does It All Mean? Online-Behavior (Online) Retrieved from: http://online-behavior.com/analytics/web-analytics-primer

Martin, M. (n.d.) Pageviews vs. Hits. Hostways (Online) Retrieved from: http://www.hostway.com/web-resources/web-analytics/pageviews-vs-hits/

Roering, S. (2012, March 8) McAfee Web Reporter – Page Views A Real World Example. Mcafee (Online) Retrieved from: https://community.mcafee.com/docs/DOC-4662