Your website analytics: get to know your metrics.
What’s the Difference Between Visits and Pageviews?
Have you ever looked at one of your website analytics reports, wondering about the difference between Visits and Pageviews?
It’s an important distinction, because – while these metrics may sound the same – they actually represent separate aspects of a user’s journey through your website.
First, let’s have a look at the meanings of these two terms.
The Difference Between Visits and Pageviews
In website analytics, the difference between Visits and Pageviews is subtle yet distinctive. Visits represent the total number of unique visits to a website or app. Pageviews represent the total number of times people opened a page during a visit. This is why your Pageviews count is often higher than your Visits count.
Here’s a handy illustration to help you understand how these two metrics are separate yet related:
As you can see, Visits is the total number of times a single user visited the website, so we count two unique Visits even though there is only one user. The Pageviews are the total amount of pages – in this case, five – that the user opened across their two visits.
Why are these Website Analytics Important?
The reason why you should understand these metrics is because it helps you measure whether or not your website performance is on track or needs to be modified in order to meet your goals.
For example, let’s say you publish a new blog post. When you check the analytics for that new post, you see a total of 10 Visits and 100 Pageviews. You may initially see the 10 Visits and be disappointed, but when you recognize that those 10 visits resulted in 100 Pageviews of your blog post page, then the data tells a whole different story. Your blog post was informative or entertaining enough that these users kept returning to it – possibly helping you achieve micro conversions.
Learn More about Website Analytics
If you want to understand more about your website analytics, reach out to us. With certification in Google Analytics, we can help you identify valuable data about your website visitors.
