You know, I had a whole plan for talking about pageviews- I actually wrote 300 words or so before scrapping my original post. See, while writing about my very analytical post (see what I did there with “analytical” on an analytics blog?), I came to a revelation of sorts. This wasn’t something new I never thought of before, just a new way of looking at pageviews. Before I get to my revelation, let’s unpack what pageviews are.
Pageviews are a super basic metric. Most likely, if you know nothing about website analytics, you’ve probably at least heard of the term. It’s the metric most anyone can grasp- it’s the measurement of when a page is viewed on a website (Pageview, n.d.). In other words, when a user loads a page on your site- any page that has tracking code on it- that hit is recorded as a pageview. It’s the turnstile counter for your website, usually expressed as per page or per site.
In fact, pageviews are such a fundamental and easily understandable metric, that unlike most entries in Google’s Analytics Help section that are detailed and long, the entry for pageviews is this:
In my experience, pageviews are the golden goose of goals. I say this because any stakeholder, no matter their technical expertise, can understand a pageview. Many analytics theorists (is that a thing?) also see pageviews as a vanity analytic.. It’s something that’s nice to track, but really doesn’t help you make any actionable adjustments. Richard Bayston at Crazy Egg says it best- “A metric that makes you feel good without telling you anything about your business (2017).” In other words, just because January saw a huge spike in pageviews doesn’t mean you can duplicate that success or use it to gain more customers. Pageviews can’t tell you what caused the spike or how to convert that into future success (i.e. a paying customer). You can make guesses and see where the traffic comes from, but because pageview spikes are for the most part something that relies on interpretation, it can be very subjective and easily manipulated. Again, more traffic doesn’t always equate to paying customers, it just shows you the ebbs and flows of user traffic.
Pageviews were so important at my newspaper, that many of my superiors would eagerly await monthly and yearly pageview reports, even connecting my bonuses with the rise and fall of pageview numbers (this eventually changed when I showed them that were far more valuable metrics to track than pageviews). They didn’t care about time spent on page, demographic information, or how people found our content- they just wanted to know how many eyeballs were on each page or site and how that affected the bottom line (ad impressions and subscriptions). They also cared if people were reading our content- the higher the pageviews, the more people were (seemingly) reading our content.
Using pageviews in this way can be a valuable way of knowing if your website is healthy or not- if the point of your business is collecting eyeballs, pageview numbers over time can be like a canary in a coal mine- if you’re trending up, you’re probably doing something right. But if you’re trending down, it’s time to dig deeper into your analytics to see where the leak is.
So pageviews are the thing to track on a media site, right? Not necessarily. There are a few pitfalls that can trip you up if you rely only on pageviews to understand your audience. For instance, the drive to increase pageviews on media sites has caused publishers and content creators to create headlines and content that entice as many people as possible to click their link- this is called clickbait, and it can even poison respectable media outlets like CNN (Hochberger, 2017). Eric Hochberger of Mediavine has a great writeup about how Miley Cyrus killed the pageview, where he talked about how CNN created a bunch of clickbait-laden content after Miley Cyrus’ eye-catching 2017 Grammy performance, and it was such a blatant grab for pageviews that the Onion wrote a satirical article from a CNN editor on how putting Miley Cyrus on their website multiplied pageviews by thirteen, even though it was at the expense of unimportant things they normally cover like people dying in Syria. Hochberger also touches on my second pitfall of tracking pageviews for success on a media website- knowing if people are reading your content doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of reader or their experience. How do you know if a pageview is someone that clicked a link and barely looked at your content or if they stayed on your page for five minutes, thoroughly reading your article and clicking something else? These are two very different experiences, each telling you something different about your user and your website. Did they have a meaningful experience? Were they encouraged to share your content? Did they bother to read your article? Depending on your goals, you could track session duration (how long a user spent on a page) to see how long a user is engaging with your content, or exit and bounce rates to see if you have successful recirculation (did they click something else on your site and continue looking around, or did they just leave after consuming their content), or event tracking for things like newsletter subscriptions. A final pitfall of tracking pageviews on a media site is inflating pageviews in exchange for user experience. This would be tricks like making a photo gallery that tracks a pageviews every time you slide to another photo or showing only a paragraph or two of your content with a button that says, “click here to read more,” with that click generating another pageview. Those additional pageviews inflate your pageviews, generating more traffic and ad impressions, but it’s a crappy user experience with the page loading over and over again or making a user click something to read more.
Now let’s look at the other way you can look at pageviews. In media, spikes in pageviews are good- it means your content is being read. But what if you run an online store? Having lots of visitors isn’t what makes you money- paying customers do. If a spike in pageviews doesn’t increase your paying customers, what good is it to track pageview spikes? You’re better off tracking actionable metrics like conversions rates.
For instance, you see a massive spike in pageviews in January. Woohoo, January is up, which makes your stakeholders happy, and you get to say traffic increased. But what do you do with that? Maybe you think, “let’s see what caused the spike and do more of that.” The problem is, you can’t figure that out from just looking at a spike in a measurable way- did some influencer or another website link to your site? Were you having a sale on umbrellas during a rainy week? Did your article or blog post go viral? You really can’t gleam anything from a spike except to say it happened and to continue tracking it to see if some sort of pattern arises.
Pageviews are a super basic metric. Most likely, if you know nothing about website analytics, you’ve probably at least heard of the term. It’s the metric most anyone can grasp- it’s the measurement of when a page is viewed on a website (Pageview, n.d.). In other words, when a user loads a page on your site- any page that has tracking code on it- that hit is recorded as a pageview. It’s the turnstile counter for your website, usually expressed as per page or per site.
In fact, pageviews are such a fundamental and easily understandable metric, that unlike most entries in Google’s Analytics Help section that are detailed and long, the entry for pageviews is this:
Okay, on to my revelation. See, I always looked at pageviews as something that you should report on and monitor, but because of the disdain it gets in the web analytics community, I always looked down on that metric. It was something to say, “hey look boss who knows nothing about analytics, here’s a fancy chart with lines moving up and down, and when it goes up, that’s good.” However, I realized in my thinking about pageviews that this metric, like any other metric, should be interpreted by what your business goals are. An ecommerce site wants conversions- get them to buy something, subscribe to a newsletter, etc. In that case, how much traffic is coming and going is secondary to conversions. But what about a business that relies on traffic?
My newspaper websites have much different goals than an ecommerce site. At my last job at a local newspaper, our website wore many hats- we wanted lots of people to read and share our great content, we wanted them to sign up for our newsletter, and we hoped that they found value in our product and were willing to become paying subscribers to get past our paywall and possibly also get our print product. However, we also generated a lot of revenue from banner ads. The more people that came to our website, the more pageviews we’d rack up. This not only increased our ad impressions (so we made more money with more impressions), but it also meant that with higher pageviews, we could negotiate better ad rates and better quality ads.
Pageviews were so important at my newspaper, that many of my superiors would eagerly await monthly and yearly pageview reports, even connecting my bonuses with the rise and fall of pageview numbers (this eventually changed when I showed them that were far more valuable metrics to track than pageviews). They didn’t care about time spent on page, demographic information, or how people found our content- they just wanted to know how many eyeballs were on each page or site and how that affected the bottom line (ad impressions and subscriptions). They also cared if people were reading our content- the higher the pageviews, the more people were (seemingly) reading our content.
Using pageviews in this way can be a valuable way of knowing if your website is healthy or not- if the point of your business is collecting eyeballs, pageview numbers over time can be like a canary in a coal mine- if you’re trending up, you’re probably doing something right. But if you’re trending down, it’s time to dig deeper into your analytics to see where the leak is.
So pageviews are the thing to track on a media site, right? Not necessarily. There are a few pitfalls that can trip you up if you rely only on pageviews to understand your audience. For instance, the drive to increase pageviews on media sites has caused publishers and content creators to create headlines and content that entice as many people as possible to click their link- this is called clickbait, and it can even poison respectable media outlets like CNN (Hochberger, 2017). Eric Hochberger of Mediavine has a great writeup about how Miley Cyrus killed the pageview, where he talked about how CNN created a bunch of clickbait-laden content after Miley Cyrus’ eye-catching 2017 Grammy performance, and it was such a blatant grab for pageviews that the Onion wrote a satirical article from a CNN editor on how putting Miley Cyrus on their website multiplied pageviews by thirteen, even though it was at the expense of unimportant things they normally cover like people dying in Syria. Hochberger also touches on my second pitfall of tracking pageviews for success on a media website- knowing if people are reading your content doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of reader or their experience. How do you know if a pageview is someone that clicked a link and barely looked at your content or if they stayed on your page for five minutes, thoroughly reading your article and clicking something else? These are two very different experiences, each telling you something different about your user and your website. Did they have a meaningful experience? Were they encouraged to share your content? Did they bother to read your article? Depending on your goals, you could track session duration (how long a user spent on a page) to see how long a user is engaging with your content, or exit and bounce rates to see if you have successful recirculation (did they click something else on your site and continue looking around, or did they just leave after consuming their content), or event tracking for things like newsletter subscriptions. A final pitfall of tracking pageviews on a media site is inflating pageviews in exchange for user experience. This would be tricks like making a photo gallery that tracks a pageviews every time you slide to another photo or showing only a paragraph or two of your content with a button that says, “click here to read more,” with that click generating another pageview. Those additional pageviews inflate your pageviews, generating more traffic and ad impressions, but it’s a crappy user experience with the page loading over and over again or making a user click something to read more.
Now let’s look at the other way you can look at pageviews. In media, spikes in pageviews are good- it means your content is being read. But what if you run an online store? Having lots of visitors isn’t what makes you money- paying customers do. If a spike in pageviews doesn’t increase your paying customers, what good is it to track pageview spikes? You’re better off tracking actionable metrics like conversions rates.
For instance, you see a massive spike in pageviews in January. Woohoo, January is up, which makes your stakeholders happy, and you get to say traffic increased. But what do you do with that? Maybe you think, “let’s see what caused the spike and do more of that.” The problem is, you can’t figure that out from just looking at a spike in a measurable way- did some influencer or another website link to your site? Were you having a sale on umbrellas during a rainy week? Did your article or blog post go viral? You really can’t gleam anything from a spike except to say it happened and to continue tracking it to see if some sort of pattern arises.
Using pageviews as a measure for success for a business website isn’t very useful. For instance, if you have a cleaning service or alternative therapy website, you’ll have a lot less traffic than say a restaurant or bar that would have lots of organic search traffic (Southern, 2019). Surprisingly, websites about marketing also have low traffic when analyzing small business pageviews. However, low pageviews doesn’t necessarily mean your website is ineffective. You need to track how valuable each of those pageviews (or the more valuable traffic indicator, sessions) really are. How many people reached out to your small business for more information or book an appointment? How many of those people signed up for emails?
Did you make a sale on your site? Tracking conversions and events are far more valuable for a service-based or e-commerce site.
So, my big takeaway for you is that any metric in your analytics can be valuable depending on your business goals, even the lowly pageview. Yes, there are better ways to monitor traffic and identify user value, but for a good surface analytic, pageviews aren’t bad- you just need to use them wisely and balance those numbers with deeper insights. And please stop sharing those “use this simple trick to cure X” links (Taboola is the COVID-19 of websites).
References
Bayston, R. (2017, November 21). What is a vanity metric. The Daily Egg. Retrieved from https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/glossary/what-is-a-vanity-metric
Hochberger, E. (2017, February 21). Pageviews are dead … and Miley Cyrus killed them. Mediavine. Retrieved from https://www.mediavine.com/pageviews-dead-miley-cyrus-killed/
Pageview. (n.d.). Google Analytics Help. Retrieved from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6086080?hl=en
Southern, M. (2019, November 30). Over 50% of local business websites receive less than 500 visits per month. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/over-50-of-local-business-websites-receive-less-than-500-visits-per-month/338137/#close
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