Hi,
Since publishing our website, less than two months ago, we've been proactive about constantly adding new content. As a result, we've been watching our "Average Pages per Visit" steadily rise.
In most posts, I see people constantly discuss things like "Unique Visits" and "Page Rank", however, I don't see much on "Average Pages per Visit". I would believe such a statistic is critical for managing site retention and true value of pages.
Question #1: Do you actively manage things like "retention" and "Average Pages per Visit" as being important to you? Why or why not?
Question #2: If you do manage it, what kind of numbers do you typically see for your "Average Pages per Visit"?
My Best,
Frank The actual statistics you rely on can vary from site to site. Some sites are small and primarily serve one purpose, others rely on clicks for revenue, and some just.. well.. don't do much of anything at all! The average pageviews of your site has very little in common with the average pageviews of my sites.
My point is that some businesses care about bounce rate, referral traffic, and locations while others need to monitor pageviews, exit pages, and conversions. Use whatever helps you the most and set it up so you can view this data consistently with minimal effort.
As long as that stat (along with time on site) continues to grow you are doing your job. Hi Brad,
It sounds like sound advice. Thanks for taking the time to answer.
My Best,
Frank Yeah, definitely site type specific. On our social networking site sometimes a user will log on and spend quite a bit time reading and posting updates to the activity stream or working on a project like a new blog post and only show as one or two pages even though they spent quite a bit of time and maybe even submitted some content. Hi,
I think an interesting statistic would be to throw out all "1 Page 1 Visit" statistics (since most represent people that probably didn't find what they were looking for or really didn't want to be led to your site and then recalculate "Average Pages per Visit".
My Best,
Frank Brad hit the nail on the head. For some sites, you don't necessarily need people to visit a ton of pages to see results. For example, on my own site, people can place an order by only going to 1 or 2 pages. I might want them to look around at a bunch of different pages, but they don't necessarily have to look at a ton of pages to make a purchase.
For me personally, I'm happier when I see them spending several minutes on the site. To me, that means they're really looking at what I have to offer - even if it's only on a page or 2. If someone visits 4 different pages and only stays on the site for 30 seconds, that doesn't do me any good. As Nicole said, time spent on site can be more important sometimes.
And I will mention visits from RSS feed, too. That are regular visitors that come to new page only. They have read other parts of site in past visits so they will visit just one page and bounce for them will be 100% but they are very important for every site.
Since publishing our website, less than two months ago, we've been proactive about constantly adding new content. As a result, we've been watching our "Average Pages per Visit" steadily rise.
In most posts, I see people constantly discuss things like "Unique Visits" and "Page Rank", however, I don't see much on "Average Pages per Visit". I would believe such a statistic is critical for managing site retention and true value of pages.
Question #1: Do you actively manage things like "retention" and "Average Pages per Visit" as being important to you? Why or why not?
Question #2: If you do manage it, what kind of numbers do you typically see for your "Average Pages per Visit"?
My Best,
Frank The actual statistics you rely on can vary from site to site. Some sites are small and primarily serve one purpose, others rely on clicks for revenue, and some just.. well.. don't do much of anything at all! The average pageviews of your site has very little in common with the average pageviews of my sites.
My point is that some businesses care about bounce rate, referral traffic, and locations while others need to monitor pageviews, exit pages, and conversions. Use whatever helps you the most and set it up so you can view this data consistently with minimal effort.
As long as that stat (along with time on site) continues to grow you are doing your job. Hi Brad,
It sounds like sound advice. Thanks for taking the time to answer.
My Best,
Frank Yeah, definitely site type specific. On our social networking site sometimes a user will log on and spend quite a bit time reading and posting updates to the activity stream or working on a project like a new blog post and only show as one or two pages even though they spent quite a bit of time and maybe even submitted some content. Hi,
I think an interesting statistic would be to throw out all "1 Page 1 Visit" statistics (since most represent people that probably didn't find what they were looking for or really didn't want to be led to your site and then recalculate "Average Pages per Visit".
My Best,
Frank Brad hit the nail on the head. For some sites, you don't necessarily need people to visit a ton of pages to see results. For example, on my own site, people can place an order by only going to 1 or 2 pages. I might want them to look around at a bunch of different pages, but they don't necessarily have to look at a ton of pages to make a purchase.
For me personally, I'm happier when I see them spending several minutes on the site. To me, that means they're really looking at what I have to offer - even if it's only on a page or 2. If someone visits 4 different pages and only stays on the site for 30 seconds, that doesn't do me any good. As Nicole said, time spent on site can be more important sometimes.
And I will mention visits from RSS feed, too. That are regular visitors that come to new page only. They have read other parts of site in past visits so they will visit just one page and bounce for them will be 100% but they are very important for every site.