A pageview, the primary subject of this text, is a common metric in web analytics[1] that quantifies user interaction with a website[3]. It’s a count of the number of times a specific webpage is loaded or refreshed. This metric is used to gauge a site’s popularity, which can be crucial for determining advertising[2] revenue. Advertisers often use a measure known as Cost per Thousand (CPM) to set ad rates based on pageviews. However, the efficacy of this approach has been questioned, with alternatives like Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per Action (CPA) being suggested as potentially more efficient. Pageviews can also be manipulated, intentionally or unintentionally, leading to concerns about the accuracy of the data. Tools and software for web analytics, such as those that count pageviews, play a vital role in understanding user behavior, traffic sources, and content performance. Monitoring and analyzing these data continuously is essential for enhancing online presence.
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In web analytics and website management, a pageview or page view, abbreviated in business to PV and occasionally called page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file (web page) of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web, a page request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on another page pointing to the page in question.
In contrast, a hit refers to a request for any file from a web server. Therefore, there may be many hits per page view since an HTML page can contain multiple files such as images, videos, JavaScripts, cascading style sheets (CSS), etc.[citation needed]
On balance, page views refer to a number of pages viewed or clicked on the site during the given time.
Page views may be counted as part of web analytics. For the owner of the site, this information can be useful to see if any change in the "page" (such as the information or the way it is presented) results in more visits. If there are any advertisements on the page, the publishers would also be interested in the number of page views to determine their expected revenue from the ads. For this reason, it is a term that is used widely for Internet marketing and advertising.