Session duration? Or something like total page acreage (number of square pixels seen by users)? Or some combo of those or other measures?

It would seem session duration would be preferable to total sessions since it adjusts for quick bounces and rewards extended engagement. I’d love to be able to see RPMM (rev / thousand minutes)… if only session duration wasn’t wildly inaccurate in GA.

Thanks Nathaniell! We do what we can and we’re always open for feedback and improvements. We rely heavily on our publishers for that.

Hey Lory,

I don’t think we mean to say that only sessions matter and page views don’t. Headlines are meant to be a bit shocking and over exaggerated.

Our primary message here is obsessing over your site’s total pageviews isn’t painting the full picture. Nor would JUST be looking at sessions and just swapping the two. We’re simply encouraging you to look to sessions as your new primary metric, but supplementing it with other metrics about your site for the full picture. In fact, pages / session are one of the metrics you should look at for your success.

Most of us are content creators and aren’t running Facebook. Our goals should be realistic. Bring a user to your site and focus on their experience with that page. Did they finish reading the article, did they find more content they wanted to consume (that second pageview), or did they sign up for our newsletter or share our post?

Obsessing over getting that one user to click on 10+ pageviews in a slideshow or jumping through hoops to finish reading the content they came for isn’t a useful user experience, nor stat. However, if your sole metric was pageviews that would become the goal. That’s our point. Look beyond the pageview.

Unfortunately, from an advertiser perspective, unique visitors are more valuable than return users because that extends their “reach.” However, I don’t think that’s our claim with this article. A repeat visitor that comes back is a second session and therefore just as valuable with his new primary metric.

I agree with that, but then it’s inaccurate to say that only sessions matter and page views don’t, which is exactly what people are saying and quoting this article as proof. (Likely because that’s exactly what your title intimates.)

You said “the first reader increased the session length and decreased your bounce rate”. Yes, they did this by increasing page views. You may not be calling it that, but that’s exactly what you’re describing.

Perhaps one might get the same effect if the visitor was either a very slow reader and stayed on one page or the phone rang and they walked away from the screen, but in any case, I don’t see the advantage to staying on one page over visiting multiple pages.

Finally, I don’t get why unique visitors are more valuable than return visitors. Sometimes it takes more than one impression to buy. What am I missing?

Definitely agree that unique visitors and sessions are more valuable to advertisers as well. From a blogger’s perspective, this can and should mean the same amount of income. Ads are paid on an impression basis and are not tied directly to sessions or pageviews. We simply calculate a RPM based off those concept so we can measure overall success of how optimizations are going.