Chapter 90. Stats—Pageviews
Is your site/app a tool that needs to be efficient? Or, do you have a site that needs to be engaging? Pageviews can tell different stories.
A “pageview” is pretty much what it sounds like: a user viewed a specific page on your website (or app).
Pageviews are a passive measurement, because users doesn’t have to do anything other than see the page.
They probably clicked or tapped something to get to that page, to view it, but analytics will count the page view even if the user leaves their apartment as the page loads, and they get lost in the woods, only to meet and fall in love with a bear and live happily ever after in the woods, never having actually seen the page.
“View” might not be the best description. Think of it as a page “load.”
Lots of pageviews can be good or bad. Or both.
If you are Google, then having a lot of pageviews is bad, because Google wants you to find the right search result as fast as possible and go to it. Nobody wants to go through pages and pages of search results.
So, for Google Search, fewer pageviews is better.
On the other hand, Facebook would probably strap a screen to your eyeballs if it could, so you would never stop viewing pages. For them, more pageviews is better.
If your site makes money by showing banners on each page, then more pageviews is good because you make more money.
However, this also creates a reason to force users to view more pages than necessary (ever seen a 10-photo gallery broken into 10 individual pages?), which ...
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