How to figure out the monthy views of your website via Google Analytics

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to view monthly visits our sites get. It's tracked via Google Analytics.

So, I've looked at various links within Google Analytics, i.e., 'Audience', 'Acquisition', 'Behavior', etc.

I thought that our monthly views comes from 'Behavior' -> 'Overview' which shows both 'pageviews' and 'unique pageviews.'

However, someone else thought that our monthly views comes from 'Audience' -> 'Overview' which I looked at and realized that number is coming from sessions.

So, really, the 'pageviews' is a more accurate barometer of our monthly visits, correct?

Clarification on this would be appreciated. Thank you.

ps. please let me know if I need to provide more information or clarify the question further.

Answer 1

So, really, the 'pageviews' is a more accurate barometer of our monthly visits, correct?

No. Visits and Pageviews are by definition different things. A visit consists of at least one (usually more) Pageviews.

You have basically three levels of aggregation:

Pageviews - no aggregation at all

Visits - a visit is a session in GA, i.e. one or more pageviews within a certain timeframe by somebody with the same clientId (clientId is an identifier set by the trackingcode)

Users - one or more visits by a user with the same clientId.

Pageview is not a barometer for visits, since the pageview count does not tell you how many different visitors you had. Ten pageviews might be one visit with ten pageviews, or ten visits with one pageview or anything in between.

To judge page performance you'd need to look at multiple metrics:

You would use the User metric to determine how many different people look at your site.

Next you would look at the session metric, it allows to see how many of your users visit more than one time.

Then you would look at the pageview metrics, to see how strongly your users interact with your content.