Page Views vs. Unique Visitors – which one Matters most?
While page views are a good measure of which pages people are visiting the most, unique visitors tell you how many different people are actually coming to your site in a given time period.
Page views are great for measuring ad impressions – each page view is a new ad impression, therefore media agencies and ad sales teams tend to focus more on page views. The problem with this is that it often translates to poor decisions around user experience and content. Solely focusing on page views may lead to companies neglecting the importance of engaging and interactive content. This engaging/interactive content is what will actually keep people on your site and get them to return in the future. Companies focusing on page views will also often choose loading a new page instead of leveraging richer interactions, as the new page triggers the coveted page view. The problem this causes is that savvy end users want smooth interactions (i.e. in page data refresh, lightboxed galleries, infinite scroll etc.), but advertisers want hard reloads so they can show more ads.
Unique Visitors are a better measure of engagement on your site since this metric shows the individual people visiting your site over a specific time period. Focusing on unique visitors allows a bit more creative freedom when designing a website and permits you do so with a better user experience in mind. When you don't care about page view count, you can deliver an experience that will delight people by using fancier interactive functions like lightbox video galleries.
If page views are high but the bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter the site and leave rather than continuing to view other pages on the same site) is also high, then you know people are not staying on the site, and thus are not engaging with the content. Also, unique visitors mean very little unless you are tracking how long each new visitor spends on the page.
Time Spent is Also Important
The amount of time spent on the page will indicate whether or not users are engaging with the content actively. If you are consistently producing good content, these metrics start to become more meaningful.
The more important metric really depends on what your goals are. Page views seem to be the obvious choice for ad driven sites looking to increase their advertising revenue, while unique visitors is a better focus for companies that want to build and grow a loyal audience. Once you have built up one metric you should start to focus on building up the other. In the end, the goal should be to have highly engaged unique visitors that are driving a high volume of page views.
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