Stats / Pages Viewed / Question

[DJilla]

I'm curious about people's experience and belief on what the Pages Viewed aspect of stats tells you.

If you have 100 uniques and 250 pages viewed, then you can average that people are sticking around to look at two and half pages... duh! But, is an average stickiness of 2.5 per unique good to you? Where do you place importance of "pages viewed" in the context of the other stats, signups, etc? Has anyone a benchmark or is it the standard answer "depends on the site"?

[Fonz]

I'd say 2.5 per unique is bad since I want to send them to my sponsor from the first page they see when they visit my site

No serious, I'm curious myself about how many unique visitors that come to your index page say to themselves: "Well this is a site I want to visit, let's search for that ENTER" link". I myself click away 50% of the time on the first page because the site doesn't look like it has the thing I was looking for.

[DJilla]

Originally Posted by Fonz

I'd say 2.5 per unique is bad since I want to send them to my sponsor from the first page they see when they visit my site

No serious, I'm curious myself about how many unique visitors that come to your index page say to themselves: "Well this is a site I want to visit, let's search for that ENTER" link". I myself click away 50% of the time on the first page because the site doesn't look like it has the thing I was looking for.

Exactly!

Blogs and TGPS excepted, one could say that if you had high PVs as a relative indicator it might say that your site is attractive and entertaining which means your getting good will, bookmarks, return visits, clicks deeper into your site etc. Where the opposite may be true with a lower number. Ultimately, PV's have to be related to sales But I'm thinking more of a site as a whole and its monthly activity. There has to be some useful information contained within the stat.

[juggernaut]

http://www.webmonkey.com//templates/...ex4a_meta.html

"Counting Pageviews
The number of pageviews you count is not the actual number of pageviews of your site. "How can this be?" you ask. "I'm simply counting records in my Web server's access log." Well, the fact is a lot of requests never make it to your access log.

First, browsers - at least Netscape and Internet Explorer - have caches. If a person requests a page from your site and soon requests it again, the browser may not go back to your server to request the page a second time. Instead, it may simply retrieve it from its cache. And you would never know. You can try using "expires" or "no cache" tags to stop browsers from caching your pages, but you can never be sure if your tags are read or not.

Second, let's say that a user's browser doesn't retrieve your page from its cache but actually re-requests the page from your server. Many ISPs use proxy servers, and proxy servers cache pages just like browsers. If a person using an ISP with a proxy server makes a request, the proxy server first checks its cache. If the page is there, it serves that page to the person, instead of going to your server. And you would never know.

Again, you can try using the tags I've described above, but there's no Proxy Server Police making sure proxy servers respect your tags.

Another tracking obstacle are bots, or spiders. These software programs scour the Web, either cataloging pages for search engines or looking for information for their owners.

Do you care if your pageview counts include hits from bots? If you do care, then you'd better find a way to ignore these hits. You can create a list of IP addresses to ignore, but with new bots born every day, the list will always be one step - or 100 steps - behind. Similarly, you can use the requester's user-agent string, but there's nothing keeping developers from sending any old string they please. Lastly, you can take a daily count of the hits and just ignore repeat hits from the same IP address if their total number passes some threshold. Then you run the risk of accidentally ignoring hits from an ISP that uses a proxy server and sends its own IP address - instead of a different IP address for each user.

With no perfect solutions, it's up to you to decide which method you can learn to live with. "

[DJilla]

Yeah! Of course you've got the cache thing and the ISP proxy, but arguably these aren't that significant in the picture I'm trying to see. Why? I might be wrong, but a page served from cache is one ALREADY seen, so it is an advantage that it doesn't get added to PV #'s. Also, unless you have a third party stats prgm and even then we all know that stats can be mischevious and deceptive, I'm guessing that on pure statistics and math, a PV ratio might have something to tell you. I would just like to know what the frick it is? I'm sure one of the gorrillas who looks at stats in the hundreds of thousands a day will have somethng to say 'bout this.

[juggernaut]

The only thing i have used them for is to calculate the amount of time people are sitting on my site. I dont have the math in front of me but when i get home ill find it. I have tried to look over pages that people have spent more time on, to see if there is somethign graphical that keeps them there. For my one site it's a little tough cause the surfers could be looking over 1 perticular cam model they like more then the others. That post I put was not my words, just what I found on the webmonkey when i find the math stuff I'll post it here for you. Don't know if it will help tho.

[DJilla]

Thanxxx if you want to put in the effort. I think maybe I should ask what does the PV ratio mean TO YOU. Maybe this is a better way to phrase. Ignore it? Watch it? Try to improve it?

Every seen the jelly bean test? Got a big jar of jelly beans. Ask 100 people how many are in there? Take any 5 or ten of the answers at random and almost all will be wildly wrong. Take all 100 answers average them and you'll be really close almost every time. Maybe we should just average out the general "feelings" about what maybe too fluid of a number.