Pageviews per Minute

Pageviews per minute is the instantaneous rate of traffic: how many pageviews were recorded in each recent minute — a live rate, not a cumulative count.

This metric is a rate rather than a count, which is what makes it suited to live monitoring: instead of how many pageviews today, it says how fast the site is breathing right now. Its use is immediate change detection — a sudden spike means a story or campaign landed, and a sudden drop to zero is usually the first sign of a technical error or outage, far sooner than it would show in a daily report. But two points: first, this rate is inherently volatile and one should not take every per-minute wobble seriously; look at the pattern over several minutes, not one point. Second, pageviews per minute is not built for historical comparison; its window is short and its job is a live alert, not trend measurement. It reads best on a short few-minute chart so the slope of change, not just the number, is visible.