Difference Between Page Views and Visits

When running a website, you need to keep track of its statistics in order to ensure that you have an audience and that they are interested in your content. Two of these statistics are page views and visits. The main difference between page views and visits is what they track. Page view is a number that is incremented every time a web page is loaded regardless of the circumstances. If the entire page is loaded, the page view increases. On the other hand, visit is only counted once every time someone visits a website.

A visit is only recorded once when someone loads one of your web pages, then no longer changes until he or she leaves your site and visits it again at a later time. When someone enters your site, both the visit and page view increases. While the user browses around your site, only the page view increases and the visit statistic remains the same. Thus, each visit can have one or more corresponding page view, depending on the activity of the user.

Both these statistics were once considered to accurately depict visitor activities. But nowadays, page views are becoming less significant. This is because of changes on web design principles. Loading the entire page is considered to be disruptive to the browsing experience, especially when only a very small amount of information needs to be changed on the page. Because of that it is better to employ client side scripting technologies that can facilitate data transfer on the background and modify parts of the page without reloading the entire page. This greatly affects the page views statistic because the page no is no longer reloaded as many times in these pages compared to the usual HTML pages.

Between the two, the number of visits is the more important one. It reflects the current interest in your site and the topic you are dealing with. Page views are no longer as important and you are much better off using other statistics to monitor your site’s health.

Summary:

Page views relates to the number of web pages that were requested while visits relates to the number of times your someone entered your site

There can be multiple page views within a single visit

Visit is still very relevant while page views may no longer be as important

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