Pageviews

What Is a Pageviews on Blogspot?

A pageview is a count indicating the number of times a Web page has been loaded into a browser. The publishing platform Blogger, used for all Blogspot-hosted sites, counts page views using Google’s proprietary algorithms. Pageviews shown on Blogspot’s Blogger Stats page differ based on the template you use for your blog. Pageviews are displayed for periods covering the life of the blog, the month to date, the week to date, and the past 24 hours. Several other factors affect the number of pageviews shown for a blog; the exact number reported by Blogger will almost always be different from the pageviews shown by other traffic analysis applications.

Pageviews

Blogger tracks pageviews differently from other traffic analyzers such as Google Analytics. With the introduction of Dynamic Views, Blogger has changed its pageview tracker algorithm to track hits on blog posts as opposed to pages, but old Blogspot templates still use the traditional pageview algorithm to track page views.

Traditional Pageviews

A blog differs from a traditional website in that one page usually contains many full articles, whereas a traditional website tends to have many pages containing discrete information. In line with the website model, a traditional Blogspot template counts the views on many blog posts contained on a single blog page as one pageview.

Dynamic Views

Dynamic Views are available on Blogger’s most recent version of the Blogspot software. Pageviews are counted as the number of clicks on a post in Dynamic Views; therefore, the number of pageviews will increase significantly if you upgrade your blog to use a Dynamic Views template. If a reader visits your blog and clicks on 20 blog posts, those clicks will count as 20 pageviews, whereas they would be counted as a single pageview using a traditional Blogspot template.

Considerations

The traffic statistics obtained from analytics software applications will vary significantly from your Blogspot pageviews due to differences in the way Blogger defines pageviews. Blogger counts some bot views as valid, whereas Google Analytics might not. Blogger also gives you the option to discount your own pageviews, but traffic analyzers will include these, which can have an impact if your blog’s traffic is low. The counting algorithms are also different. You may need to average the results of different pageview analyzers to get an estimate of your actual readership.

What Does Pageviews Mean in Google Analytics?

"Pageviews" in Google Analytics refers to the number of times Internet users have viewed a particular Web page. You may run a site that relies on this data. Whether you are a blogger or the manager of a corporate website, you have the ability to track page views using Google Analytics.

Capturing Page Views

When someone visits a website, software running in the background may be tracking their surfing activity. Site owners use tracking software to monitor the number of visitors that visit their pages, the content of the visitor's view, and even the buttons they click. Before a website can track Web surfers, it must set up a way to log site visits and store records of browsing activity. Web servers that send content to your browser need to know your IP address and some information about your browser. To get a page view count, you can simply add one to a hit counter every time someone visits your Webpage.

Google Analytics

Even if you can write your own code to track pageviews, you may not have a database or Web server in which to store your tracking information. Google solves this problem by giving everyone both a free place to store tracking data and the JavaScript code needed to capture it. Simply add the code to the page you wish to track, and the code will capture page views and store it on Google's Web servers. View your pageviews and other tracking data from your Google Analytics page. Tracking reports also show you information about users who visit your site.

Page View Uses

One way to tell if your new page layout or ad campaign is working is to perform page-view analysis. Do this by tracking your pageviews before updating your site design or trying out new marketing strategies. Make your site improvements, and track page views again. If page views increase, you may wish to keep your changes. You can also use pageview counts to determine the popularity of their sites. One challenge of popularity is dealing with Internet congestion. If your pageview statistics show a significant increase in Web traffic, you may wish to increase your Web server capacity to help improve the browsing experiences of your users.

Tips

Every time a site visitor presses a browser's "Refresh" button, it requests new data from a Web server and rebuilds the Web page when the data arrives. Google Analytics counts each page refresh as a separate pageview. Keep this in mind when viewing page view statistics in your report. Just because a report shows a value of 100 for pageviews, that does not mean that 100 different users visited your page. If you would rather count the number of "unique pageviews" -- that is, pageviews from unique visitors -- you can do that by looking for the “Unique Page View” field found in the Top Content report found to run from your account page.