While we’re not going to say that Google Analytics is simple, there’s quite a bit you can learn about your site by understanding a few basic concepts. Let’s start with the relationship between users, sessions, and pageviews and explain the page views metric. A guide & tutorial to learn and understand all you need to know about Google Analytics pageviews & reports, the most important metric explained.
Google Analytics Pageviews Explained
Google Analytics has this handy feature explaining a specific metric or dimension when you hover over the question mark icon. According to Google Analytics, a pageview is: Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
According to Google’s Google Analytics support site, a pageview is: Page view (or pageview hit, page tracking hit) is a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser. Pageviews is a metric defined as the total number of pages viewed.
Now that’s a pretty straightforward explanation. So, let’s say you have a page about a Basic SEO course: pageviews will show the number of times that page is viewed for a given period.
The metric says nothing about how many visitors saw that page or how many times it was viewed per session. It’s just the total number of page views per page. This means that one visitor can be responsible for many page views and that a page can be viewed multiple times per session.
More Metrics
Page views can indicate how popular a post or page is. But having many page views for a post doesn’t necessarily mean it is popular. Is it a good thing that you have a lot of page views per visit?
Does it tell that people like to read many pages on your site? Or does it mean that they can’t find what they’re looking for? A good data analyst is always critical of his or her data. A single metric doesn’t tell you a lot; the context provides the information you can use.
Speaking of context, you might think: “Why don’t I see ‘sessions’, ‘pageviews’, and ‘users’ in one grid table in Google Analytics?” There’s a reason why Google Analytics doesn’t let you see pageviews in combination with sessions and users by default.
And that has everything to do with how Google Analytics collects its data. Google Analytics data is organized based on scopes. You can see these four different scopes if you want to add a Custom Dimension:
LunaMetrics wrote a blog post on understanding the scope of Google Analytics, which explains why you can’t combine metrics from different areas.
In short, they say: never combine hit- and session-level metrics. So if you create a custom report showing page views and sessions per page, you get a report that doesn’t make any sense. Because sessions have hits, but hits don’t have sessions.
Pageviews context
So if you can’t combine user and session metrics to pageviews, what can you do to add more context to the pageviews metric? A guide & tutorial to learn & understand all you need to know about Google Analytics pageviews & reports, the most important metric explained.
Unique Pageviews
First, you can look at the number of unique pageviews compared to page views. According to the question mark in Google Analytics: Unique Pageviews is the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once. A unique pageview is up for each page URL + page Title combination.
I think this definition needs some more explanation. Let’s say a visitor visits a page about a Basic SEO course, then reads an introductory SEO article, and then calls the page about a Basic SEO course again. During this session, the Basic SEO course page views happens two times.
These two pageviews in this single session will be present to that page’s total number of pageviews. But only one unique pageview will be up to the total number of unique pageviews for that page during a single session.
The Metric on Pageviews for Google Analytics
If you want to see the number of sessions for a page. The best way is to look at the unique pageviews metric. If you divide the number of page views by the number of unique pageviews. So, you get the average number of times a particular page was receiving views per session.
It’s a good idea to check the pages for which the number of pageviews differs greatly from the number of unique page views. This means that visitors viewed this page several times in a single session. That may indicate that the page is confusing people. But there are other explanations for this as well.
Segmenting Pageviews on Google Analytics
By looking at the number of page views per visit and creating a segment. That lets you compare groups of users and see where they differ from each other. For instance, visits with more than 3 page views against less than 3.
Are these two groups coming from different sources? Do they read additional articles? Do they buy things or not? Comparing groups will help you understand your audience better. A guide & tutorial to learn & understand all you need to know about Google Analytics pageviews & reports, the most important metric explained.
How To Increase Google Analytics Pageviews?
- Improve your website’s navigation: Make it easy for users to find what they’re looking for on your website. Use clear and concise menus, breadcrumbs, and internal linking to guide users to related content.
- Create high-quality content: Publish informative, engaging, and relevant content to your target audience. Use images, videos, and infographics to make your content more visually appealing.
- Optimize your website for search engines: Use relevant keywords in your content and meta tags to improve your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Promote your content on social media: Share your content on social media platforms to increase its reach and attract more visitors to your website.
- Email marketing: Send newsletters and promotional emails to your subscribers to keep them engaged and informed about your latest content.
- Offer related content: Use related posts or recommended articles to encourage users to explore more of your website’s content.
- Improve website speed: Optimize your website’s loading speed to reduce bounce rates and improve user experience.
- Use call-to-actions: Use clear and compelling call-to-actions to encourage users to take specific actions on your website. Such as subscribing to your newsletter or downloading a free resource.
Final Words
Page views allow you to track how web traffic interacts with your site. Since unique pageview filters out page refreshes and multiple perspectives in a single session. You are provided with a more accurate look at the traffic coming in.
This makes it easier to see which pages drive the most traffic. The content people are looking for. All that should inform what content you put on your website and help you determine how to get more unique page views.
