The festive season is a challenging time to talk statistics, but this metric is special; it helps you understand how sales effective your website is and might even save you money!
Pages per View
This simple metric indicates how interested visitors are while in your website. The greater the level of interest, the more pages visitors will view.
Most importantly Pages per View is NOT an indicator of how good your site is, but how well matched your visitors are to your site. Good matches represent prospective clients and sales; poor matches do not.
In my experience an average pages per view of around 2.5 is a critical threshold; below which there is an increasing mismatch between visitor and content, with 1 being an absolute mismatch. An average pages per view above 2.5 indicates an increasingly strong match.
Page per View can be used in conjunction with other web site metrics to bring greater meaning to otherwise dry statistics; for example valuing referrals.
Valuing referrals
Referrals are visitors who come to your site via another website.
As in off-line business, some referrals are good and others are a waste of your time. You quickly grow to understand that some referral sources are more valuable than others.
As we are all time-poor, it makes sense to focus our energies on the important sources of leads because these represent the greatest business opportunities.
The Pages per View metric can quickly and surprisingly accurately indicate the value of referrers of prospective clients to your website.
For example use it to evaluate paid referral sources such as Yellow Pages; White Pages or the many business and industry based internet directories, by observing the average Pages per view of traffic flowing from these sources.
The referring sources sales pitch might be that they provide 100 visitors a month, but if your average Pages per View for them is only 1.6 then you know there is a low level of match with these visitors; little chance of a sale and so little value to you.
Use this empowering information to review and negotiate with directory service providerS about their rates.Â
Why pay for advertising that is of no value to you !
Where are my website metrics?
Your hosting service can provide you with statistics for your web site.
If you donât know to access your stats contact your hosting serviceâs support line.
I unabashedly prefer Google Analytics â its free; marketing based rather than technically based and world class. Check it out at www.google.com/adwords
Interested in using the internet to generate sales? Contact me if you would like to explore how online marketing may be able to assist your business.
If you think the information in this newsletter is useful, I encourage you to forward it to peers, business associates etc.
If you do decide to plagiarise my work, please acknowledge it with a link to my site 
All the best for the festive season and the New Year!
Sincerely,
Peter Cornish
peter.cornish@succinctideas.com.au
www.succinctideas.com.au
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