Check Out Your Competitors’ Page Views and Benchmark Against Them - A How-To Guide

A high number of page views isn’t necessarily an indicator of high user engagement or potential revenue from your website or app. But, that doesn’t mean page views are insignificant. Monitoring and working with this key metric may even be more valuable than you think. The trick is to look at it in the right context.  

On Google Analytics, page views mainly help with your technical and functional analysis. We will show you a way to monitor your page views and visits in a way that caters to business management. 

What Is the Definition of Pageviews in Google Analytics?

Let’s go to the source and ask the Google Analytics help center:

“A pageview (or pageview hit, page tracking hit) is an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser.”

Each time a user opens a page, it counts as a view. The user may leave and go back to the same page 20 times during a session, each time the site crawler records a page view. Even when the visitor reloads or refreshes a page, it’s another view.

This doesn’t tell you much about a visitor’s behavior. To learn more about that, Google Analytics also provides unique pageviews. This shows the aggregated number of page views generated by the same user in the same session. In other words, each page the user opens in one session is counted only once, even if they reloaded and visited the page multiple times.

How Does SimilarWeb Calculate Page Views?

SimilarWeb’s marketing intelligence platform provides an additional, similar metric, in which subsequent views of the same page are included until the user is inactive for at least 30 minutes. 

For example, if a user opens a page and reloads it several times, or moves to another page and comes back, that’s one page visit. The user then decides to leave your site to compare your product to that of a competitor and is inactive on your website. If they return within less than half an hour, it’s still the same visit. If they stay away longer, their return counts as an additional visit.

This helps get a better understanding of how visitors interact with the pages on your site or app. You can then look at the Pages/Visit metric to understand how many different pages on average the user viewed during a session or visit.

Note that most businesses use first-party direct measurement tools such as Google Analytics to measure and analyze traffic to their own domains. The data provided by these tools is different from the data provided by SimilarWeb, which comes from multiple sources, including panel-based behavioral data and public data sources. 

Leverage Daily Page Views per Visitor for More Insight

To help you understand the scope of engagement per user, monitor how many pages a person views on average in one day. You want to understand the behavior of a unique visitor. How many pages or features does one access on average? Do they visit the same page all the time, do they have several favorite pages (if so, which), or do they explore random places on your website?

On the SimilarWeb platform you can set the time frame to monitor Total Visits – i.e., over weeks, months, or even years. You will then see how many pages each unique visitor viewed on average per the selected timeframe.

Why You Should Look at Monthly Visitors

Looking at daily highs and lows is not enough to determine business achievements, but rather the ability to sustain high numbers and steady growth will determine your success or failure.

SimilarWeb lets you monitor periodic page views, such as monthly, weekly, or daily visits, which are a bit complicated to find on Google Analytics. Mobile apps, retailers, and SaaS B2B companies benefit the most from this feature. 

The Monthly Visitors metric helps you understand the level of activity on your site in the context of time and over long periods. The page views metric is equivalent to dividing the number of monthly visits by the number of pages per visit.

By looking at the bigger picture, you can better understand trends and variations over time. This is useful for strategic planning. You can even use monthly visits in your goal setting for the year/quarter ahead.

What Is a Good Number of Monthly Page Views Based on My Industry?

If you enter this search query in Quora or Google, you get answers ranging from 1,000 to 100,000. What’s worse, all the answers are correct. A blog is very different from a product page on your eCommerce site. eCommerce site, and a navigation app is different from a news app.It also makes a difference whether you are new or established in the market, a local or international enterprise and if you’re targeting small or large businesses. 

It’s up to you to work through the jungle of data to figure out how you measure up. SimilarWeb helps with that because it focuses on competitive benchmarking and provides the most useful tools for applicable comparisons.

Tracking Your Industry’s and Competitors’ Page Views

You know better than any analytics software who your biggest competitors are. The platform allows you to pick a number of competitor sites, see their page visits and compare the performance across key engagement metrics. Keep tracking their stats and yours to get a clear view of your business landscape.

Another option is to choose a category and benchmark yourself to the industry as a whole. Knowing where you fit in with a similar crowd helps assess your market position more accurately, lets you focus on areas that need improvement, and set long-term goals for market growth.

SimilarWeb also provides you with a monthly Email Digest, including information about your website page views and those of your competitors. 

Next Step: Improve the Quality of Your Website Traffic 

We’ve shown you how analyzing page views in the right context of time and competition can be beneficial for your long-term business objectives. What you really want to investigate, though, is the quality of your traffic, in addition to its quantity. Ultimately, you want traffic that converts and visitors who buy your product, engage with your site, and return for more.

SimilarWeb PRO lets you dig into data that helps evaluate your traffic quality. Designed to help you understand how your users think and act, and how your competition performs, SimilarWeb aims to provide data that helps you manage your business. You can set and monitor goals with a  direct connection to your business objectives. 

This blog post was written by Daniel Schneider, in collaboration with Ruth M. Trucks.

Previously published at https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/compare-pageviews-with-competitors/