You might have encountered this situation when reporting your metrics report.
Your client or internal marketing managers saw the number of Pages per Visit (or Pageviews/Visit) increased or decreased, and they'll come asking rather that is good or bad.
* Pages per Vist = PPV
First of all, if you're getting a reaction to changes in PPV, that's probably better than getting no reaction or comment. However, it is important to come to an understanding with your counterparts that PPV could be a powerful metrics depending on how you look at it.
To me, it is quite useless if you just site there and look at this metric go up and down, and claim it as good or bad without any context or a goal.
Web site's goal and objective
Depending on what you're trying to accomplish with your web site, how you look at every metrics and KPI's would be different. In terms of PPV, what would be your bottom line?
How do you want your PPV to look like when you put your site's goal into consideration?
Case #1: Let's say you're going to run a mini-site to acquire site registrations, and attempt to market to those registrants later. It turns out you'll need a minimum of 3 pages to complete the registration process. In other words, reach the confirmation/thank you page.
Then ultimately, you'll like to see your PPV on this mini-site around 3~4. Obviously, if your PPV says 2, then people are probably not reaching the confirmation page. Time to look at the conversion funnel !!
Case #2: For news related site (like NYT, WSJ, Reuters, etc.), you can see PPV in many different ways. Because it is highly likely that these sites are monetizing through CPM based media ads, from that stand point, they may want to acquire a lot of PPV as much as possible. In that case, high PPV would be nice, but it is also important to assess different levels of PPV by various news categories.
If they're promoting related articles through artificial intelligence tool (IA, predictive modeling, etc.), then that will be another area where they would want to see multiple PPV as well. Setting goals for PPV by verticals or by different micro-objectives within a site would become important as well.
Translate that analysis and educate your users
From analysis stand point, each analysts are probably well educated enough to measure different level of PPV by looking at different dimensions (by source, site sections, etc.). However, your insights would need to be translated to others, so that they don't limit their views on PPV on one flat number in one dimension.
P.S.
I've encountered a site where PPV dropped 50% after the site relaunched, and it was due to multiple reasons, which was mostly attributed to better site design. It was a little challenging to translate to others that this "decline" was good. What's your story?
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