Page View Event

A page view event is the event recorded when a page loads; it is the most frequent and most basic event in web analytics.

A page view event is the backbone of classic web analytics because nearly every traditional metric derives from it: pageviews, top pages, pageviews per session and bounce rate are all built on it. But in the modern web it has an important gap: in single-page applications where the URL does not change on real navigation, the initial load creates just one page view event and the rest of the transitions go unrecorded unless a virtual page view event compensates. Another point is that a page view event alone says only 'arrived,' not 'did something'; to understand behavior it must be read beside interaction events. A common misconception is equating a page view event with a unique visitor; if a user refreshes a page five times, five page view events are created but there is one visitor.