Pageviews: A Basic but Beneficial Metric for Web Analytics

The pageview is one of the more basic Google Analytics metrics, and also one of the most hotly contested. While it can be helpful to those sites publishing content, it also has several drawbacks marketers need to keep in mind when analyzing and reporting web metrics. 

What is a Pageview?

A Pageview is defined by Google (n.d.a.) as “an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser”. Malnik (2020) further explains this by stating, “It’s a fairly generous measurement as if you land on a page, that’s a pageview. If you reload that same page, it counts as another. If you leave the page and come right back, it’s yet another pageview—all from the same page and user”. Google Analytics tracks the total pageviews for a website as well as the number of pageviews for each page on the site.

Why are Pageviews an Important Web Metric?

Note. Quote sourced from Bonini (2020)

Pageviews can help show marketers which content is most important to consumers if going with the assumption that high pageviews indicate interest. If a specific category of pages yields higher pageviews, the site may want to consider creating complementary content. In turn, if pages involving specific subject matter have consistently lower pageviews, the website may want to shift content focus. A low number of pageviews can also imply poor search engine optimization, although other metrics should also be analyzed to reach this conclusion (Raka, 2018). Pageviews may also be helpful when linking to specific pages on a site. If a link has a high click-through rate but this does not correlate with the number of pageviews, a marketer may want to examine if the link destination is correct. In addition, a high pageview count could indicate that a page is not rendering correctly, highlighting which pages should be fixed (Mostyn, 2015). 

Pageviews are especially important for websites that publish content or sell advertising placements on their sites (Gant, n.d.). For example, companies often sponsor blogs on websites to position themselves as thought leaders and increase brand awareness. If a sponsored blog has a high number of pageviews, this metric can be reported back to the sponsoring company to demonstrate increased exposure. If a sponsored blog has a low number of pageviews as compared with blog placements on other websites, the sponsoring company may want to consider placing their content with other partners.  

Finally, pageviews are essential in helping to calculate other website metrics. Metrics such as exit page ratio, pageviews per visit, unique pageviews, bounce rate, and some conversion metrics all require pageviews in their formulas. 

Disadvantages to the Pageview Metric

While the pageview metric is important to track, it is not without its fault. Some considerations marketers should be aware of involving the web metric are listed below. 

• Because pageviews are accumulated each time a page is loaded, the metric is the same whether one person loads a page 100 times or if 100 people view a page. In practicality, these two situations could hold very different values to a business. Using the unique pageview metric helps ameliorate this problem. 

• Nico Miceli of SEER Interactive notes “if I said you got 10,000 pageviews but only 10 of them scrolled down to actually see your CTA, is the 10K still impressive?” (Gant, n.d.).  Depending on the business objective, the pageview metric could be beneficial in this instance. However, if the business objective involved a call to action lower on the page, it would not aid in establishing success. This example demonstrates the importance of tracking scroll depth in addition to pageviews. Scroll depth can be tracked using Google Tag Manager (Google, n.d.b.).  

• Pageviews do not offer insight into the viewers’ opinion of the content. Sam Slaughter, former VP of Contently and CEO of Lighthouse Creative Group comments on pageviews that “just because someone saw an ad doesn’t mean they liked it, and it definitely doesn’t mean they like the brand that paid for it” (Slaughter, 2013). Marketers should examine other engagement metrics in order to understand consumer sentiment. 

How to Track Pageviews in Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides easy access to the pageviews metric. Once a Google Analytics account has been established and a web property has been set up, the total pageviews for the website can be found by clicking “Audience” and then “Overview” (Figure 1). Pageviews for specific pages can be found by clicking “Behavior” followed by “Site Content” and then clicking “All Pages” (Figure 2). 

Figure 1

Total Site Pageviews

Note. Sourced from Google Analytics

Figure 2

Pageviews by Page

Note. Sourced from Google Analytics

References:

Bonini, J. (2020, September 23). The 10 most-tracked Google Analytics metrics [Original data]. DataBox. https://databox.com/the-most-tracked-google-analytics-metrics

Gant, A. (n.d.). 6 Questions for 6 analytics experts. Orbit Media Studios. Retrieved on March 27, 2021, from https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/analytics-experts/

Google. (n.d.a.). Pageview. Retrieved on March 27, 2021, from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6086080?hl=en

Google. (n.d.b.). Scroll Depth Trigger. Retrieved on March 27, 2021, from https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/7679218?hl=en

Malnik, J. (2020, June 2). Sessions vs. users vs. pageviews in Google Analytics: Everything you need to know. Databox.  https://databox.com/sessions-users-pageviews-in-google-analytic

Mostyn, S. (2015, June 26). Google Analytics: 7 Important audience metrics to track. Practical Ecommerce. https://www.practicalecommerce.com/google-analytics-7-important-audience-metrics-to-track

Raka. (2018, January 24). What exactly are page views and why are they important? https://www.rakacreative.com/blog/inbound-marketing/page-view/

Slaughter, S. (2013, June 10). The pageview is dead. Digiday. https://digiday.com/media/the-pageview-is-dead/