When talking about page views per session, we are not looking just at a metric that helps us manage our website. We are also looking at and determining how easy is it for one of the users that access our website to navigate through it.
For example, if you have an article, let’s say, on one page of your website, and at the end of it you link another article within your website that may be interesting to your users, if they click on that article, and therefore increase your page views per session, that means that your content is worthy of their time.
Basically, if two interconnected pages on your website have a similar number of page views per session, it means that you are properly doing your job at guiding them through your website and, therefore, increasing your conversion rate.
The Basics of Page Views per Session
If this metric is not directly displayed under the statistics segment of your website’s admin panel, then you can easily calculate it by dividing the page views by the number of visits – the result will be the average page views per visit.
Moreover, this metric can be used to determine the value of the average visits on your website. This can be done by dividing the average dollar value by 1,000 page views (in the case of CPM) and the page views by visit, then multiply the two results. This way, you can find out which is the value of the average visit.
In short, the page views per session metric is important because it can show the website owners the things they need to change in order to increase this number – of course, a higher number of page views per session is preferred.
Via this metric, they can see exactly where the users stop engaging with their website – on which page – and return to the home page or just leave. Therefore, one can easily determine which page needs some modifications.
How Can One Increase the Page Views per Session?
As mentioned a couple of times before, one can check which parts of his website are doing a poor job at generating page views per session. However, most of the times, it is hard to notice what you are doing wrong. As a start, you should look into the navigational elements of your website and make sure that any user that accesses it has an easy time moving through several pages and reading the content that’s on them. Of course, we don’t even have to mention the fact that your content must be properly written in order to make users want to switch pages and read more of your articles. Moreover, the search functionality on your website must be optimized as well.
When it comes to search functionality, the opinions are quite diverse, as it depends on whether you want the user to be satisfied with the content or if you want to increase your page views per session.
For example, you might force a user, through search functionality, to click a link inside one of your articles in order to find out more information about a certain matter – by some, this is seen as good functionality. On the other hand, you can have all the information needed inside an article, therefore making your users stick to it and, therefore, not view any of your other pages – this decreasing the number of pages viewed on your website.