Web Analytics India

- Contributed by Deep Moni Hazarika

It’s so much a ritual now to find out the depth of a page or website. How different is it to say rhyming with “death of a page or site”! Fear not. Depth or alternately called Page Views per Visit is says how deep inside your site did a visitor go in a regular visit. However do note that its Average Page Views per Visit that we are more likely to look at. This is a figure we more often than not don’t avoid calculating, to add that “extra piece of valuable information”. A greater depth of visit for a content generation site would mean a “Wow!” but the same for a support related site would mean “Oh no! I gotta bring it down”. So, reactions differ depending on the nature of the site.

But wasn’t I going to speak about some ‘misleading’? Well on a quick note, let me ask this - what does an Average Page Views per Visit of 0.87 mean? i.e. if there were say, 100 Visits, then there were 87 pages viewed. How do you explain that? Under ideal conditions, every visit has to have at least one page viewed. But the scenario looks confusing here. There are extra 13 visits and if every visit has to have at least one page view, then we are either missing some data or our calculation is wrong somewhere! Funny ehh! Technically, would it also mean that for those visits, a page did not get loaded in the browser completely or returned some error? Nope! Because, an incomplete page means a client to server status code was passed which was not 200 (the success status code). And as it goes, all web analytics tools reports only successful page requests when showing up those numbers. Then what did those extra visits actually do?

Looking at it another way, are we looking at the complete picture? Is anything wrong with that formula? How can that be? World over, the formula has been laid out plain and simple, again and again. Now let’s look at the same thing with an additional bit of information. There were 100 visits. There were 87 pages viewed. In addition to that, in those 100 visits, let’s say there were 13 pdf files downloaded. Going by the standard definition, the average page views per visit is still 87/100 = 0.87, but with a slight modification in the formula to include the pdf files downloaded, we get the same browsing behavior as 1 now, i.e. (pages viewed + downloads)/visit. Seems to make sense!

On dissecting this scenario, we can see that when we say pageviews per visit as the depth, we have been considering only the ‘pages’ viewed and not the downloadable contents. Considering the scenario where a visitor is not aware of your website but frantically looks around for some information through search engines and one of your websites pdf file gets listed amongst the top results. The visitor now willfully clicks on that pdf link and in effect has caused one visit and one download but no page view. This situation cites that accessing a single pdf also is an engagement with a depth of 1 for that visitor, considering the visitor didn’t access any other content in your website. Visitors of such kind coming from a search engine are one of the many possibilities where content is directly accessed without necessarily causing any page view. In effect to that, the depth of the website can be a number less than 1 if considered only for ‘pages’ and higher than 1 when considered for both ‘pages’ and ‘downloadable’ content.

This also shows how the simple formula can lead to confusing interpretations. So what is your take on the depth of visits to your site? Are you sure you are getting it correct?

My next post will elucidate on how the simple formula of page views per visit can itself be an all in itself when looking into some of the available analytics tools.

Reference links:

1. http://blog.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2005/07/average-page-views-per-visit.html
2. http://elementsinc.net/blog/2008/08/04/a-key-indicator-for-your-website-is-the-average-number-of-pages-viewed/