Why Do People Still Care So Much About Page Views?
Which is more successful is a website that gets 10,000 visitors a month with a conversion rate of 0.2% or one that gets 500 with a conversion rate of 4%?
Recently, a client rang me sounding delighted. “We've had 10,000 visitors this month,” he gleefully informed me. “The website's working!” When I asked what outcomes that was generating, they weren’t so confident. “We're not sure,” they admitted. “Maybe two or three enquiries?”
Page views, the number of times a webpage is viewed, are not necessarily the most helpful analytics to monitor. While they can be useful for comparing the relative popularity of certain pages or understanding how much traffic you're getting, they’re not the whole story. A page view counts any instance that a page has been loaded, whether it’s a bot, an administrator viewing the page, a rival doing some market research or an individual who happens to have your page open for three seconds by accident. All of these visits get a page view just the same as an interested party that stays on your website and reads your content attentively.
What other analytics should be monitored instead? Here are my favourites.
Bounce rate
Traditionally bounce rate tells us the proportion of website visitors who land on your website and leave without visiting another page. A high bounce rate indicates that most of your traffic isn’t finding what they’re looking for when they visit your website, suggesting improvements can be made. However, since Google replaced Universal Analytics with GA4 in 2023, bounce rate is calculated in a different way. GA4 instead measures engagement rate, the inverse of the traditional definition of bounce rate. An engaged session is defined as a session that lasted for at least 10 seconds, had two or more session views or led to a conversion event.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the proportion of people that undertake an action you’ve deemed worthwhile, such as a purchase, enquire via a form, subscribe, download a resource etc. Conversion rate tells you how successful your website is at generating outcomes. If your conversion rate is low it may indicate the site isn’t user-friendly, intuitive, engaging, informative, trustworthy or doesn’t otherwise motivate people to act. It may be worth revisiting the goals of your website and how you’re prompting people to act to see if improvements can be made.
Scroll depth
Scroll depth shows you how many people made it to specific sections of your website. This helps us understand whether people are viewing the key messages you’ve included further down the page or missing out on them altogether. For example, if 90% of your visitors are leaving before they reach your pricing section you may want to think about ways to promote it in case it’s providing information people want before making an enquiry.
Completions for specific goals
You can set up Google Analytics to count certain actions as conversions and report on their frequency, phone calls made, forms submitted, buttons pressed, videos started etc. This helps us understand the relative popularity of calls-to-action so we can prioritise promoting the most popular options further and make sure key actions aren’t being overlooked.
Engagement rate
GA4’s engagement rate shows you what percentage of users are having an engaged session. If your website has a low engagement rate you may want to consider making it more informative, engaging, interactive or intuitive. It may be helpful to review the language you’re using to ensure it speaks to the right people. It could be that your website’s visuals aren’t performing as well as they could, your calls-to-action need improvement or your pages aren’t responsive enough for mobile. There are lots of ways you might be able to improve your website’s engagement.
Average engagement time
Whereas traditionally average time-on-page included everyone who had your website open (even if they were ignoring it and looking at something else), GA4’s average engagement time aims to understand how long people are paying attention to your pages. If the figure is low you may want to consider ways of making the pages more engaging.
Rather than monitoring page views obsessively it’s much more useful to monitor these more insightful analytics to help you understand whether people are engaging with your website and taking action. After all, all those page views are meaningless if no one’s making use of your website.
Are page views good enough for GA4?
They're a starting point, sure. But most people stop there. Then all you're doing is staring at GA4 hoping more PVs somehow means your website is making an impact.
What about setting up at least one conversion event that reflects what's important to your business? Maybe that's a form fill out, a phone number click, a booking. That gives you something to measure website success with.
Set up at least one conversion event in GA4.
