If you are here on this page it is probably because you are struggling to understand the difference between these three metrics. Keep reading the article that all the mystery will be solved.
First things first, it is impossible to understand the difference between them before not being aware of their meanings and functions.
Index
What is the function of UniquePageviews?
The definition is pretty simple, as the name already says, it is when the user is visiting only your page during a single session, no other one but yours. If this person leaves the page and comes back after a while, that would be another unique pageview for your metrics. Unique views are considered as user sessions/page.
What is the function of Pageviews?
Is the number of times the page has been viewed. If the same user clicks on your page many times, it will be tracked each visit as a page view. Tracking the pageviews is important because that is who we know if the website is performing in the way you expected or not.
If you notice that there are more Pageviews than UniquePageviews, that means people are visiting your other pages without leaving yours.
Pageviews X UniquePageviews: which one is more important?
Once you are aware about the function of both of them, it is time to understand which one is more important to track.
Everytime a person presses ‘refresh’, a new Pageview (not a UniquePageview) will be counted. This information must be on your head, because it is not necessarily a new user on your website, it can be the same one just pressing the refresh button. It is not indicating that different users have accessed your page.
Therefore, the number of UniquePageviews must also be tracked by you, this one is truly showing how many unique visitors have seen your page.
What are Sessions?
Sessions are nothing but a cookie, that has an expiration term that lasts just 30 minutes. If the user doesn’t have a session cookie, your analytics will create a new one. On the other hand, if the user already has it, his expiration will be set to 30 minutes once again.
To make a long story short, sessions are the interactions that happen on your website site during these 30 minutes, called ‘span time’.
When the user accesses your site, the session cookie is activated, his session started and all that is tracked for you.
The importance to be aware of this number is that it gives you the estimate of how many times a user did activities on your site.
Sessions VS Pageviews: what is the difference between them?
Finally we have understood the three terms of this article, now let’s focus on this least topic: understanding the difference between sessions and pageviews.
- Sessions: Like it was said before, it is the repetition of one single visitor to your website and show all the information about the Session of him (the time of interaction he had on your site).
- Pageviews: Just one Session can include many Pageviews because the number of pageviews doesn’t depend on how many users are accessing the site, it can have many pageviews by just one user.
There are many other tools and metrics to track your web page, but Pageviews, Uniquepageviews and Sessions are really important ones. In the end of the day, these metrics are tracking how well your website is faring.
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