Amazon Sessions vs Pageviews Difference Explained

If you are an Amazon seller you are probably familiar with the business report on the seller central.

The reports provide merchants access to a variety of useful data. Despite their riches of data, not all sellers are aware of what each column means and how to apply the data.

There are two columns that cause a good sense of confusion as they seem to represent the same thing. These columns are:

Sessions and Pageviews.

Although these two columns seem similar but they are not. In this article, we will discuss how these two stats are different and how you can interpret them.

Sessions

Let’s begin with session, a session can be confusing for the newer sellers. The name is not as straightforward as say page views.

Session is the number of unique visits to your Amazon pages by a user within a 24 hours period

Noticed that I highlighted unique, if, within a 24 hours period, I click on a Amazon product listing, then 2 hours later, I click on the listing again this will count as one session.

In a real-life example, you visited Rick’s Super Gym just for a tour. You won’t be working out in this gym right away as you are just window shopping for a gym membership. After visiting multiple gyms, you decided on getting a membership at Rick’s Super Gym 5 hours later. Although I went through the door at Rick’s Super Gym twice its still counted as One Session.

Pageviews

Now know what session, pageviews are probably more obvious.

Pageview is the number of hits in your Amazon listing gets for the selected time period

The number of visitors to your Amazon listing is measured in page views. When a shopper visits your listing many times, the total number of times is added together as page views. Pageviews are NOT unique.

Going back to our Rick’s Super Gym example. Since we went through the door twice in this example the pageview is 2.

Amazon Sessions vs Pageviews

A customer’s visit to Amazon pages is referred to as a session. Even if a client shopper visits a number of pages many times (within 24 hours) during a visit, it will be counted as one session. The number of times a client viewed a page is referred to as page views. A client can browse multiple pageviews in a single session. As a result, now I am going to state the obvious.

The relation between Pageviews and Session will always be:

Pageviews > Sessions

Since the session is counting the unique visits where the pageview is not. You will rarely run into situations where sessions will match pageviews exactly

Amazon Sessions vs Pageviews Variations

You also can use these two metrics to see which variations are more popular. You do this by going into the business reports, select “Detail Page Sales and Traffic By Child Item”, then sort by the column “(Parent) ASIN”. You can see all the child ASINs and their corresponding parent ASIN together. Here you can see which child ASINs have more pageviews to help you make an informed decision on your product category (related blog post on Amazon brand analytics).

Interpreting Amazon Sessions vs Pageviews on your Business Report

Page views per session are an indication of how many touchpoints your customer needs before a conversion.

You need to think of this from a shopper’s perspective. Does your product require multiple touchpoints?

For example, a shopper will probably need to do a lot more product research for a $400 baby stroller than a $15 baby bib. Hence, the logic will be the listing for the baby stroller will have a higher pageview per session than the baby bib.

You also need to look into correlations. Ask the following questions:

• Does having a product with higher pageviews per session lead to a higher conversion rate vs when a product does not?
• Does increase sessions correlate to improvement in sales?

Is Pageview or Session more important?

When I look at Amazon business reports (More on Amazon advertising reports), I pay attention to both of these measures. I believe they complement one other and assist to give a full story about your business.

You want to know how well your consumers are connecting with your product listings just as much as you want to know how many individual customers are visiting your business. For this, you’ll need data from both sessions and page views.

It also depends on your current objectives. If you want topline growth, look to concentrate on the sessions metrics. On the other hand, if your objective is to improve conversion rates, you might want to see an uptick on pageview per session.

Conclusion

Hope this article clears the air on the difference between pageviews and sessions. I know there are just loads of data on Amazon and can be overwhelming for even the most seasoned sellers. Successful Amazon sellers will always test and then monitor their data. Sessions, and pageviews are 2 key metrics sellers should monitor to see if their tactics are on the right track and keep them trending upwards. If you found this post interesting you may also like our blog posts on Amazon KPD Earnings, What is a good CTR on Amazon or take a look at our complete Amazon abbreviations list.

Sources:

• Brandalyzer
• Sellbrite