🚦Web Traffic: Pageviews, Users, and Sessions

The first few metrics young organizations generally engage with are measures of web traffic — pageviews, users, and sessions. These answer the basic question, "Is anyone looking at our website?" And the natural follow-up, "How many people? For how long?"

They’re also included in the category of engagement metrics. The Venn diagram of web traffic and engagement is almost a perfect circle, but it's important to understand the associated business terms used by stakeholders in order to facilitate alignment about what the metric's definition is. In a nutshell, you need to know the buzzwords for data governance purposes.

Hubspot defines engagement metrics as follows:

Website engagement metrics measure how much your website visitors are interacting with your website and online brand. These metrics can tell you where your visitors tend to go on your website, for how long, how often, and how they arrived on your website.

Unsurprisingly, Google Analytics dominates the website performance data collection "space" (speaking of jargon!). Their free service, with Google's name recognition and reputation for excelling in search (but do they really?), is very popular. There are a lot of other platforms to choose from, though, from powerhouse Adobe Analytics to small-but-mighty Y Combinator-backed Mixpanel.

📜 Pageviews: Counting is Hard

Across companies and industries, I’ve consistently observed that the metrics that seem the simplest — specifically the ones involving counting something — can be the hardest to pin down.

Why is that? There are several factors, but I’m convinced that a big one is that we — as functional teams and individual contributors — all think we know the definition of some very foundational concept, like what a “customer” is, and go about approaching the data with that assumption unstated. At some point, we realize the business intelligence team’s numbers don’t match the customer success team’s, whose don’t match the finance team’s or the marketing team’s.

As you probably intuited, pageviews (or page views, as some prefer) are a measure of the number of views of a webpage. It sounds straightforward, but there are some nuances, so proceed with caution.

Defining a metric or term is always— and I very, very rarely say “always” — better than not defining it. Having a consistent, agreed-upon, vetted, interrogated, socialized, written-down definition will save you time, effort, and unnecessary meetings, and — most importantly — will enable a trusting relationship between you, the data practitioner(s), and everyone else at your organization.

Essential components of a meaningful and precise definition of pageviews will answer the questions:

1. Which pageviews are we going to count? Sessions of a certain length of time? If so, what is the smallest time interval we'll consider to be a countable meaningful interaction?

2. What about multiple views by the same user in quick succession? Are those one or multiple pageviews? How many time units define "quick"?

Let’s take a look at the Google Analytics definition of pageviews found in the Google Analytics Help Center Glossary for inspiration.

A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser. Pageviews is a metric defined as the total number of pages viewed.

By Google’s definition, the pageviews metric doesn’t involve who the viewer is or when they do the viewing, so to answer one of the questions posed previously, we should count our multiple views by the same viewer in a short timeframe as distinct pageviews.

🛑 But wait. Google Analytics provides a more detailed definition in an article titled “The difference between Google Ads Clicks, and Sessions, Users, Entrances, Pageviews, and Unique Pageviews in Analytics” (🤯 what a mouthful!), also in the Help Center:

A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.

So we've learned that Google does have a more precise definition of pageviews, but if you don't take a deep dive into the documentation, you might accidentally conflate this number with the actual metric of interest: unique pageviews.

The Google Analytics developer’s guide definition is more technical, obviously, but clear. It tells us exactly which sites will be tracked and counted in Google Analytics pageviews. Essentially, it's the fine print to the definitions in the Help Center.

There are two ways to send a pageview to Google Analytics:

1. Use the default behavior of the gtag.js snippet

2. Send manual page_view events

I’ll translate two slightly technical aspects of the definition that point to another decision point--how to implement tagging on your website--that may affect your organization's definition of pageviews.

1. A gtag.js snippet is a short bit of code written in JavaScript, the language of interaction on the web. A layperson can follow these instructions and paste this code into the right place on their website's pages. This implementation doesn't require a software engineering team and it returns standardized results.

2. A page_view event is a replacement for the aforementioned snippet of JavaScript. It tells Google Analytics NOT to count pages the way it does by default, but to count the pages we want to count the way we want to count them. (This is a more advanced implementation which would require support from the software engineering team.)

Adobe Analytics documentation defines pageviews similarly, and so do other platforms I’m familiar with.

Whew! We traveled the long and winding road of the Google Analytics documentation just so I could emphasize the importance of this aspect of data management and governance: Define everything. Do not assume your definition agrees with any other person or entity's definition. Write your definitions down and shout the location from the rooftops.

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Finally,

after a long journey,

the calculation:

SUM(Pageviews)

The mathematics is easy for this one, but getting it right is hard.