Internet Marketing Conundrums - Which is better; unique visitors or page views?

The question to many - if not all - internet marketers is to ask themselves is which number is more important; Unique visitors or Page views? To try answering this questions we first have to fully understand the two terms.

A unique visitor is an individual user who has been to your website. No matter how many times the same user visits your site from his device or the same browser, the person will only be counted once. If the user chooses to visit your site from a different device or/and a different browser it will be counted as a new visitor.

Page views on the other hand, is the total amount of time your page has been visited. If the same user visits your site 100 times in one day, the page view count will increase by 100.

I will set up two scenarios to demonstrate what to look for when viewing the unique visitors number and the page number.

Let’s say that a website has a low unique visitors number but a relatively high page view number (the page view number can never be lower than the unique visitor number), meaning the difference between the two numbers is big. The difference shows us that the site has a small new audience, but of from that group of users many of them return. This indicates that while the site does not reach a big new audience, the users visiting the site are pleased with the content and come back for more. A benefit of this is that Google Algorithms read this website as a valuable source of information

On the other spectrum we have a scenario where a site has a high amount of unique visitor and an equally high amount of page views, meaning the difference between the two numbers is small. The small difference together with the high amount of page views shows that the site has a big audience, but most of the users visiting the website do not return, indicating that the site might have a good SEO strategy, but the users visiting the site do not particularly like the content. This is good statistic for internet marketers who's strategy is to market with landing pages or review websites.

Which of these two scenarios is preferable depends on what kind of website we talk about. For a blog having dedicated readers is very valuable, while an affiliate getting money on a CPM basis from advertising will prefer having a lot of visitors even if it means they won’t return.

For a good search engine rankings both unique visitors and page views are taken into consideration. Additionally, length of visit also plays a role in determining the ranking. So even if unique visitors are not important on it’s own merit, everyone wants a high SERP ranking, so focusing solely on SEO is just not enough. There needs to be some good content to back it up.

With all this being said, unique visitors and page views are of secondary importance compared to conversions and sales. That’s what matter in the end of the day! Unique visitors and page views however are unarguably a good hint on how a website can improve, and using the numbers for exactly that purpose will undoubtedly improve both conversion rates and sales while moving up in the rankings.