Does it matter how many pageviews your site serves? Of course not. What matters is how much you sold, how many people signed up, how informed or persuaded they became, or how engaged visitors were (and for how long) in whatever it was the site is offering. Yet “page views” is a common, prominent, and frequently discussed metric in website analytics.

The death of page views is being discussed (here too), giving a good reason to shine a little light on what it tells and doesn’t, and how we can perhaps better use this common metric.

Page views are a popular measure for three reasons:

1. They give some idea of how many steps a visitor took, how engaged they were, in the process or information that your site is providing.
2. It’s something of a universal, and therefore provides a way to compare one site to another – how many page views did your site get last month? How many averages pages per visit?
3. Analytics companies tend to set their fees based on page views.

The argument that page views are flawed cannot be denied. The problem is that a page view is not a consistent and universal measure of progress or anything else. A good site design, well written copy, and clear navigation all lower page view counts. Ajax programming techniques and other java widgets provide functionality that would have required a page refresh, without a page refresh, and thereby also lower page view counts while at the same time increasing what can be accomplished on a ‘page’. RSS syndication takes the content from the page and puts it somewhere else where it is seen - without being counted.

One of the reasons this came up is that someone decided that MySpace has a lousy design which requires way more clicks than necessary, thereby inflating its page view numbers, and then took the trouble to estimate how much lower it would be if the pages were better designed. (see the large drop after Q1, 2006?) And it turns out that if this were the case the $580 million the site changed hands for might have been a substantially lower number.

But assuming you’re not looking to pawn your site off on Rupert Murdoch, or aren’t selling banner ads for your primary source of revenue, what does this mean to your use of the Page Views metric? I think it just suggests that you should think of it as a very relative measure.

Continue to watch it as a quick barometer of activity. Given your current site design and content, page views do provide a sense of how visitors are consuming the site from one day (or week) to the next. You’ll obviously want to know the ‘internals’ (number of visitors and average pages per visit) too.

Force yourself to think about why you’re driving that number of page views (and pages per visitor). Take it to heart that driving down the page view count by improving your design, content, or navigation is a good thing. Calculate and track your average revenue per page view, and try to drive it up by both improving page content and navigation and by eliminating links and paths that your analytics show to be generally unprofitable.

And remember three things:

• Page views are a lousy way to compare disparate sites.
• You don’t sell page views, so there’s no pride in having a lot of them.
• You do pay for page views (with most analytics) so you might as well make each one count.