Unique Page Views

To understand what a unique pageview is, you must first try to understand what a pageview is.  When a user views a page on your eCommerce website, it is counted as one pageview. However, if the same user reloads the page that he is currently viewing, then viewing the reloaded page is counted as another pageview. That means when a page on your website is refreshed or viewed, a pageview is counted. In simpler terms, the number of times the webpages on your website are viewed or refreshed/reloaded within a given time span is referred to as the number of page views. 

However, page views are not unique because unique pageviews are different from ordinary page views. Unique pageviews are not generalized page views, they are unique, unique to users and sessions. When an individual views a page of your website within his session then the pageviews during that session that are oriented to only that user are called unique pageviews. Where pageviews refer to the number of times a page is viewed over your website by different users, unique page views refer to the number of times a page on your website is viewed by a unique user in his unique session.

The length of the sessions varies according to the kind of analytics service you are using. For example- In Google Analytics, a session is 24 hours long. 

Let us try to understand unique pageviews with the help of a real-life example. Imagine you visit Amazon to buy a pair of socks. Now you type ‘socks’ in the search box and the search result leads you to a page on Amazon where all the available socks options are listed for you. Now from a large variety available in front of you, you decide to choose the black colored socks and you click on the link to that which leads you to another page on the website, but now you want to revisit the previous page to go look at other options, so you click on the back button and you come back to the page where your search results were displaying. Now you have visited the search result page twice and the black socks page once, so the total page views are three, however, when we talk about the unique page views, they are only two because no matter how many times you revisit the same page, it is still counted as one unique pageview.