Visitors Or Page Views?

If you're a blogger, there are two main statistics that mean the most. Visitor numbers and page views.

Visitor numbers are vital. The more visitors, the wider spread of people you're reaching out to. One level up from that are unique visitor numbers. The count of separate individuals - rather than numerous visits to your site made by the same people. 

Page views are also a vital statistic. It shows you how many pages your visitors are roaming through while on your site.

But which is more important? Depends on your own personal goals. Me personally, I think visitor numbers are more important. It gives you a clear indication of the scale of your website and how many people it is reaching out to. A website survives on visitor numbers, not necessarily page views.

For example, you could have 30 page views, made by only 3 visitors. Surely a better count of a website's traffic is the number of people coming to read it? I would take 30 visitors making 3 page views each instead.

Page views can also be a bit inefficient at times. Almost all blogs show a minimum of ten posts on the home page. So even if a visitor is reading 5 posts you've written, that is still only going to constitute as one page view, when really it should be recorded as 5.

Time for some stats. On the day this post was written, I had 119 visits to this site, from 102 different people - which I don't think is too bad. I also had 279 page views. Now if I had only told you about the page views, you may think that this isn't that many. But when you consider I'm averaging well over 130 visits per day at the moment from over 100 different people, I'd say that this the better measure of how well the site is doing.

I'd love to hear what all you fellow bloggers think about this, whether you agree or disagree. 

P.S. I'm forming a post about comments and how vital they are too!