Page Performance
-
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
-
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.
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Tracked Event for Button Now I would I like to know that Customer reached to thank you page?
Hello Expert, For my ecommerce site I am tracking "Retrieve My Basket" button as event tracking. Now I want to know after retrieving basket did my customer reached to thank you page? So how should I track such goal? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | dsouzac0 -
How does Google measure page position in Webmasters?
Does anyone know exactly how Google measures page position in Webmaster Tools? For example: In Google Webmaster Tools, we had a product which on the 22/12/15 was at position 7, and then dropped to position 112 on the 30/12/15. It then rose back up to position 7 on the 6/01/16 and then down to position 25 on the 16/01/16. What does this mean and why?
Reporting & Analytics | | CostumeD0 -
Crawl errors for pages that no longer exist
Hey folks, I've been working on a site recently where I took a bunch of old, outdated pages down. In the Google Search Console "Crawl Errors" section, I've started seeing a bunch of "Not Found" errors for those pages. That makes perfect sense. The thing that I'm confused about is that the "Linked From" list only shows a sitemap that I ALSO took down. Alternatively, some of them list other old, removed pages in the "Linked From" list. Is there a reason that Google is trying to inform me that pages/sitemaps that don't exist are somehow still linking to other pages that don't exist? And is this ultimately something I should be concerned about? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | BrianAlpert780 -
Switch to www from non www preference negatively hit # pages indexed
I have a client whose site did not use the www preference but rather the non www form of the url. We were having trouble seeing some high quality inlinks and I wondered if the redirect to the non www site from the links was making it hard for us to track. After some reading, it seemed we should be using the www version for better SEO anyway so I made a change on Monday but had a major hit to the number of pages being indexed by Thursday. Freaking me out mildly. What are people's thoughts? I think I should roll back the www change asap - or am I jumping the gun?
Reporting & Analytics | | BrigitteMN0 -
Google Analytics - Next Page Path is the Same URL?
Hey Everyone, I have a Google analytics question. I'm looking through a client's site and when I look at the next page path, I get the same URL as the next path. For example, on the homepage, the next page path I get is the homepage again? This happens for all URL's, is this an implementation error? Is there a way to fix this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | EvansHunt0 -
Relation between Page and Landing Page
Hi all, I am looking through the Analytics data on a specific 'page' (404.html which is the Not found page) and as my secondary dimensions, I have Landing Page data. Now am I not sure how the page and the landing page are related here. Is it basically saying 58 Page views of the 404.html were originated by the users who landed on brochures.html? If someone could provide any pointers on it, it would be great. Thank you for your time. uZQJ
Reporting & Analytics | | nirpan0 -
Can 500 errors hurt rankings for an entire site or just the pages with the errors?
I'm working with a site that had over 700 500 errors after a redesign in april. Most of them were fixed in June, but there are still about 200. Can 500 errors affect rankings sitewide, or just the pages with the errors? Thanks for reading!
Reporting & Analytics | | DA20130 -
GA custom reports involving pages and goals - what are the metrics saying?
Hi, All! I would like to create a custom report that will enable me to see which of my pages are contributing to goal completion on my site (so I can then optimize the pages that are contributing the most, with maximal ROI for the optimization investment). If I make the dimension "page/page title" and the metric "goal X completions" - which would make sense - what exactly are the numbers that I am seeing telling me? Is it how many times a person started the goal funnel from that pages (meaning every goal would appear only once and there be no overlap)? That doesn't appear to be the case with the numbers, because the headline in the main "Goals" section tells me I have 30 goal completions for that goal, for example, but the headline in the custom report (which is adding up all the numbers) is, say, 100. Or does it mean the number of times that this page was ever in the navigation path of someone who ended up completing a goal? Then the same goal would be counted multiple times, for each page in the path. Additionally, I see this strange thing on some of my reports where the actual funnel pages appear as contributing towards goals, which I guess makes sense, but again the numbers don't match up. If the goal was to get to page B, and the funnel was A->B, and there were supposedly 30 goal completions, my custom report says that A gave 28 goal completions and B gave 25. Anyone know for sure - or through testing - what the case is with all these things? Any explanations will be much appreciated!
Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx0