Two widely used metrics in Google Analytics are page views and unique page views. Both are used by digital marketers to measure the performance of a website or a web page over a given period of time.
Many people, intentionally or not, confuse page views with the number of users a website has.
Page views is not the same as the number of unique users who have visited a website. As you’ll see below, pageviews are the total number of loads and reloads of the same page, by the same user within a single user session.
This means that it is incorrect to present the pageview metric as the total number of visits a website received during a given period of time.
The value of pageviews will always be greater than the number of unique visitors to the site.
In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about Google Analytics Page Views, including:
What are pageviews in Google Analytics?
The pageview metric in Google Analytics shows the total number of pageviews over a given period of time. A page view is a view of a page that is being tracked by Google Analytics. A view can be the initial load of a page, a reload, or a new visit to the page.
This is the official definition given by Google Analytics:
Google Analytics Page View Definition
What counts as a page view?
When a web page is loaded (or reloaded) in a browser, this counts as a single pageview.
Here is an example to understand how a pageview and pageviews are counted.
- John visits page A.
- While on page A, he reloads the page (clicks the Refresh button).
- From page A, you click a link to go to page B.
- From page B, you click a link and return to page A.
In the scenario above, Google Analytics will show 3 pageviews for page A and 4 pageviews for John’s session.
What are unique page views?
‘Unique Page Views’ shows the number of sessions that a specific page was viewed at least once.
In the above scenario, the total number of unique page views for page A is 1.
In simple terms, the unique pageviews metric shows how many unique users visited a particular page, while the pageviews metric shows the total number of times a page was viewed (can include multiple views from the same browsing session). Username)
How to see pageviews in Google Analytics
Let’s see how to see pageviews in Google Analytics reports.
Go to the PUBLIC > OVERVIEW report. You will see a table like the following example.
Audience overview report showing pageviews
Take a closer look at USERS, SESSION, PAGES/SESSION and PAGEVIEWS.
Users in 2009 started 2,114 sessions (site visits) and in each session visited an average of 1.35 pages, resulting in 2,863 page views.
So in this example the actual number of unique visitors was 2009 and not 2863 (pageviews). It is wrong to say that this website has 2863 users.
How to see unique pageviews in Google Analytics
Go to the SITE CONTENT REPORT (located under BEHAVIOR > SITE CONTENT > ALL PAGES). You will see these numbers:
Site Content Report – Google Analytics
Please note that SINGLE PAGE VIEWS are less than PAGE VIEWS. This is because a single user may have visited a particular page more than once during a single session.
How to combine pageviews with other metrics for more actionable reporting
Pageviews are in themselves an important metric, but when combined with other data, they can help you understand more about your website and visitor behavior.
Here are some examples:
Create a segment to split your page views between desktop and mobile.
In the PUBLIC > OVERVIEW report, click +ADD SEGMENTS and SELECT MOBILE TRAFFIC.
Mobile Traffic Page Views
This will show you how many pageviews you received from mobile compared to the total number of pageviews.
Mobile Traffic Page Views
How many users created more than 3 page views
You can also go a step further and create a custom segment and see what percentage of your users created 3 or more pageviews before they left.
More than 3 pageviews Custom segment
If you’re new to Google Analytics, read these 3 guides to get a better idea of how to use Google Analytics reports to improve your website.
Key learnings
As a general rule of thumb, the higher the number of pageviews a page receives, the better. But that should not be confused with the popularity of the page.
Users can generate more views for a page if they reload it during the same session by going back and forth.
For example, if you have a page with a list of links to other pages on your website, that page may have many more views than other pages because users may click to visit one of the internal links and then return to the page to visit next etc.
A more accurate metric in this case is unique pageviews. This will give you a better idea of how many UNIQUE users have visited the particular page.
If, on the other hand, you want to measure how many (unique) pages users visit before leaving, you should focus on the PAGES/SESSION metric.
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