Page views per visit: How engaged are your visitors

Some web metrics are evolutions of each other. Visits and page views are foundational web analytics that are critical to understand, with pages per visit/session as an evolution of visits and page views, and referral paths and goals as a “final” evolution of those foundational metrics. Think of these three metrics as all relating to understanding whether or not your target audiences are reaching your desired pages/steps online. In this blog post, we’ll examine page views per visit and how it can be applied to achieving your business objectives.

The definition of page views per visit is pretty self-explanatory, the metric can also be referred to as pages per session, which is what Google uses. Pages per session and time per session can provide critical insight into how long people are staying on your website and how deep they’re making it into your site.

Image from WPBarista.com

So, why is this important? Well, if you’re trying to give web visitors valuable content, you don’t want those visitors to have to travel too deep in your website to find it. Most websites experience diminishing visitors the deeper into the site you go. If you’ve just written this great blog that will help drive new accounts for your company, but you have to click through six pages to get to your blog…there’s a good chance few people are going to read your blog. This logic can also be applied to conversions and goals for organizations. If you have a goal of certain conversion actions (requesting materials, for example) and you don’t seem to be hitting your goal numbers, you can reference pages per session and shorten the path for users to receive those goal materials. Let’s look at a real-life example of this in play.

BigMamaBlog.com

Regular website redesigns aren’t uncommon for businesses as a means to “freshen up” the online presence. While a redesign may have an aesthetic purpose, there are underlying engagement goals that drive the need to redesign.

WP Barista dove into the differences in analytics from before and after a redesign of the website BigMamaBlog.com, a lifestyle blog. WP Barista’s blog post dove into the impact of the redesign from a number of different angles, with a focus on engagement improvements. The Google analytics metrics were even segmented by referral method. Website referral traffic is a useful data set, as I mentioned in a previous post.

Across all referral methods, pages per session increased. WP Barista noted that this could be a result of a more engaging, simpler web design helping engage audiences longer. In this example, the metric pages per session was used to help quantify a successful change…even though the change may have not been initially driven by data. In practice, this effort could have been done using an opposite approach. The website analytics pre-redesign said that visitors were viewing less than 2 pages/session, what could we do to increase that engagement? A redesign could be suggested, and the increase in pages/session would have proven the change successful.

One thing to note, is that a pages/session count of 2 pages might seem low. On the contrary, 2 pages per session is actually a standard goal across most industries. Pages per visit/session is a metric that can help tell your audience’s engagement story and prompt ideas on how to improve it, as seen in our example. Businesses can also use pages per session to understand where to place critical web landing pages, all with the goal of achieving business objectives.