Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition
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In web marketing, if unique visitors are the people, page views are their footprints. Page views are the measure of interest in specific areas of your site. Most traffic-reporting tools will give you a few different ways to look at page views:

  • Overall page-view count for your entire site: Look for a Pageviews report to see the aggregate view.

  • A page-by-page look at which pages get the most attention: Look for a report called Top Content or Top Pages to see a comparison of popular pages.

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Don’t use page views to measure audience size. One visitor may view 100 pages, while another may only look at 1. Having one customer who walks through your store and looks at every product isn’t as good as having ten who look at a few products each. The same holds true on the web. Page views are an awful measure of audience size.

Do use page views to measure

  • Visitor interest: Combined with visitor data, page views are a great reflection of visitor interest. Page views per visit, are one indicator of just how interested your audience is in what you’re showing them. If someone stays on your website and looks at ten pages, chances are that visitor is more interested than someone who stays on your website and looks at only one page.

  • Content performance: Pages that get more page views are better performers. They also tell you what your audience wants to hear. A page that gets 4,000 views in a month is probably drawing more interest than a page that gets 1,000.

  • Ad performance: Most traffic-reporting tools show page views per visit generated by specific referrers. Ads that generate more page views per visit are usually better performers.

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Again, see how the different metrics can be combined? Page views are a great measure of raw site usage. Page views per visit (per session) give you an added dimension: visitor interest.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

John Arnold is the author of E-Mail Marketing For Dummies and coauthor of Mobile Marketing For Dummies.

Ian Lurie is President of Portent, Inc.

Marty Dickinson is President of HereNextYear.

Elizabeth Marsten is Director of Search Marketing at Portent, Inc.

Michael Becker is the Managing Director of North America at the Mobile Marketing Association.

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