Page Performance

[PGD2011]

Not long ago, I had a couple of peers asking why I was using sessions to evaluate page performance. They said it wasn't a good metric for evaluating a single page because it only looked at how many site visitors began their journey through you site form that page.

They were trying to convert me over to pageviews, which they said was a superior metric because it show you every time that page had been loaded and therefore provided better insight.

Moz uses sessions on their landing page report. Is this because it's an SEO tool, so all they are concerned with is how individual URLs attract site traffic?

Signed,

Confused in California

[PGD2011]

Thanks for the info Dmitril!

Totally agree with what you're saying. Seems to be a split in the SEO community. Some people are using pageviews as a metric to judge performance on the page level, and some use sessions. In my opinion, Landing pages + Sessions + Avg Session Duration + Bounce Rate are good page level metrics.

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

Well, neither sessions nor pageviews are superior metric, if you look at it with no context. Here is an example - home page always would have way more sessions and pageviews than other pages. And, at the same time, a landing page can have 100-200 sessions/pageviews. But, the value of proper landing page is usually way-way-way higher than home page, since that would be your direct conversion traffic.

So, why MOZ uses sessions - because it's one of the common metrics to use, which you can go off of. It's easy to compare in reports etc.

Hope this helps