Date First Published: 2nd November 2022
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: Web Development
Difficulty: EasyDifficulty Level: 3/10
Learn more about what a page view is in this article.
A page view, also spelt pageview, is an instance of a visitor loading or reloading a webpage into their web web browser. For example, if 50 visitors accessed a single webpage and then went onto another webpage, that website would have a total of 100 page views. Page views can be defined as the total number of pages served to visitors.
Page views are often measured as part of web analytics services, such as Google Analytics. This information can be useful to the owner of the website as it can help determine the performance of their website as well as how visitors are interacting with it.
Since a single page view is recorded every time a visitor loads or reloads a webpage, lots of page views can be counted for a single user, which can make it harder to determine the number of people that have visited the page. Page views measure all views, regardless of how many times the same visitor has visited that page. Unique page views are tracked, which measures the number of unique visitors so if one visitor viewed the same page multiple times, it would not increase the number of unique page views. Unique visitors are often tracked by their IP address or a cookie to determine repeated visits.
Visits are slightly different from page views. Visits refer to the number of individual people that access a website and this metric helps determine how many people are interacting with the website, regardless of the page. A page view occurs when a website is loaded in a web browser. Therefore, a visit to a website can generate lots of page views. A high number of page visits indicates that a website is popular, but if the number of page views is low, it could indicate that people are not clicking through enough pages on a website to view content. Visits and unique page views are basically the same things.
The term 'hits' is often incorrectly used to describe page views or the number of people that access a specific website. A hit is recorded for each file that is downloaded from the web server that loads during the page view. For example, if a HTML webpage contained five images, an external CSS sheet, and a reference to a JavaScript file, it would generate a total of eight hits. But, it would be one page view regardless of the number of files loaded on the webpage. It is very likely that there will be multiple hits per page view. For more information on the difference between hits and page views, see here.
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