What is a pageview?
A pageview is a single recorded view of a page on your site. Every load counts, including reloads and repeat visits to the same page in one session. It is the base unit of web analytics: sessions group pageviews into visits, and unique visitors group sessions into people.
Formula
Pageviews per session = total pageviews / total sessions
- pageview
- One recorded view. In a single-page app, one route change if client-side navigation is tracked.
- unique pageview
- Views of a page collapsed to one per session, which answers how many visits included the page.
Worked example
One visitor, one visit, a documentation site.
| Loads /docs/install | 1 pageview |
|---|---|
| Reloads it after editing a config file | 1 more pageview |
| Opens /docs/events, then goes back to /docs/install | 2 more pageviews |
| Total | 4 pageviews |
4 pageviews, 2 unique pageviews, 1 session, 1 unique visitor The same visit produces four different numbers depending on what you asked. Reports go wrong when someone compares one site's pageviews to another site's sessions.
What counts as a pageview
Classically, a pageview is recorded when the tracking script runs during a document load. Reloads count. Returning to a page you already viewed counts again. Opening the same page in two tabs counts twice.
Modern applications broke that definition. In a React, Vue or Next.js app, moving between screens changes the URL through the History API without loading a document, so a tracker that only fires on load records one pageview for an entire session. Every screen after the first is invisible.
The fix is to track history changes as pageviews, which is what mrkr's tracker does by default. Without it, pageviews collapse, bounce rate goes to almost 100%, and time on page stops working, all from one missing behaviour.
Compared
Pageviews, sessions, and visitors Three counts of the same traffic, at three levels of grouping. They are related but never interchangeable.
| Metric | Counts | Typical relationship |
|---|---|---|
| Pageview | Every view of every page | The largest number |
| Unique pageview | Views collapsed to one per page per session | 60% to 80% of pageviews |
| Session | One visit, ending after inactivity | Pageviews divided by 2 to 4 |
| Unique visitor | One person in the period | Sessions divided by 1.2 to 2 |
Typical relationships are rough patterns, not rules. A documentation site runs many pageviews per session; a single-page landing site runs close to one.
Live demo
See it on real data. The live demo is a fully populated dashboard on demo traffic, with no signup and no card.
Open the live demoWhere pageview counts go wrong
Untracked client-side routing
The most common tracking bug there is. Symptom: pageviews per session sitting at 1.0 on an app people demonstrably click through.
The script installed twice
A tag manager plus a hardcoded snippet doubles every number on the site. Check for duplicate requests before you believe a sudden traffic jump.
Bots counted as people
Crawlers generate pageviews at scale. Measured over 30 days on a live site running mrkr, AI and search crawler hits were 8.7 times the human pageviews.
Adblockers removing them
A meaningful share of visitors block third-party analytics requests outright, so pageviews are undercounted unless you serve the tracker from your own domain.
Pageviews in mrkr
mrkr records a pageview on document load and on client-side history navigations, so single-page apps report the same way multi-page sites do. Each pageview carries the path, the referrer, campaign parameters, and coarse device and country information, with no cookie set in the default mode.
Bot and crawler traffic is classified at ingest and excluded from the reported figures rather than filtered afterwards in the dashboard, so the number you see is already the human one.
Pageviews are also the metered unit for billing, and the only one: goals, custom events and session replay are stored without being counted. What a pageview allowance costs per month is on the pricing page.
FAQ
What is the difference between a pageview and a unique pageview?
A pageview counts every view, including reloads and repeat visits within one session. A unique pageview collapses those to one per page per session, so it answers how many visits included that page rather than how many times it was rendered.
Do reloads count as pageviews?
Yes. Every execution of the tracking script on a page load records a pageview, so refreshing a page five times produces five pageviews. Unique pageviews are the metric that removes this effect.
Why are my pageviews lower than my server logs?
Server logs count every request including bots, prefetches and asset loads, while analytics counts rendered pages by real browsers with the script running. Adblockers widen the gap further. A serving-side count being several times higher than analytics is normal, not a bug.
Start with one line of HTML.Your first visitors show up within a minute.