Page views are the least useful number your content produces

Robbie Haas · 24 August 2026 · 4 min read

Four thousand views. Nine-second average time on page. That post didn't get read. It got clicked.

Somebody landed on it, took one look at the headline they'd already seen on LinkedIn, and left. Multiply that by a quarter and you have a slide deck full of arrival data being presented as evidence of interest. It isn't. Views tell you a browser loaded a URL. That's the entire scope of what they know.

Why the number stuck around anyway

Page views are popular for a boring reason: they're the easiest thing to pull, and they almost always go up. Publish more, get more views. Run a paid promotion, get more views. Change nothing at all and let a post age into a few more search impressions, get more views.

Every analytics dashboard leads with it. It's the first card on the screen, the biggest font on the page, so it becomes the number everyone learns to defend. You start the month hoping it climbs, and when it does, you feel like the work landed. That feeling is doing a lot of unearned work in your reporting.

The problem isn't that views are wrong. They're accurate. They just answer a question nobody in the budget meeting is asking.

What you're actually being asked

The question in that room is whether content produced pipeline. Not whether content was seen. Whether it moved money.

Views can't answer that in either direction. A post with 200 views that three buying committees read end to end before they ever spoke to sales did more for the business than a post with 40,000 views that pulled in a crowd with no reason to buy. Views can't tell those two apart, which means they also can't defend you when someone asks whether the content budget should exist next quarter.

That's a rough spot to be in. You're holding the number that goes up and it's the number that proves nothing.

Start with three metrics that mean something

You don't need a rebuild. Three signals will get you further than any view count, and all three are available in tools you already pay for.

• Scroll depth past the halfway mark. Someone who gets to the middle of a 1,200-word post made a decision to keep going. That's the first honest signal of interest you'll get from a page. If 6% of your traffic clears the halfway point, you know something real about that piece, and it's usually uncomfortable.
• Returning readers. Not returning visitors as a blob, but people who came back to your content specifically. Coming back is a stronger vote than any single session length. It means the last thing they read was worth the trip.
• Second-page visits in the same session. Someone who reads one post and immediately opens another has stopped browsing and started researching. That behavior looks nothing like a bounce, and it correlates with buying intent far better than any traffic total.

Report those three every month. Same three. The consistency matters more than the sophistication, because trends in a modest honest number are more useful than a big number that only ever climbs.

The number that survives a hard question

Assisted pipeline is the one that holds up when someone pushes.

Which deals touched a piece of content before the first sales call, and how many days earlier did they show up than deals that didn't. That's it. Two facts, and they're the ones a CFO can hear without needing a translation from marketing into English.

Attribution isn't perfect and never will be. Somebody read the post on their phone, forgot it, saw a colleague share it, then filled in a form three weeks later on a laptop that looks like a different person to your analytics. Fine. You're not building a courtroom case. You're building a defensible pattern: deals that touched content arrive warmer and earlier, and here's the count.

You don't need a data team to start. You need one tracked event on the pages you care about, tied to whatever identity you already collect, and the discipline to look at the same report every month. One event. Most teams can set that up in an afternoon and then spend six months arguing about whether to do it.

Smaller and honest beats bigger and meaningless

The trade nobody wants to make is walking into a meeting with a lower number on the slide. Views were 40,000. Halfway scroll rate was 9%. Assisted pipeline touched eleven deals. The second and third numbers look worse and they're the only ones you can act on.

That's the whole argument for switching. A metric is only worth tracking if you can move it on purpose. You can't make people care more by publishing more, but you can rewrite an intro that loses 90% of readers in the first screen, and you'll see it in the scroll data within a month. Views would have gone up either way and told you nothing about which change worked.

Pull your top ten posts by traffic this week. Sort them by halfway scroll rate instead. The order will change, and the posts that jump to the top are the ones worth another 400 words and a second promotion.

Then put those numbers in your next report and let the view count sit in an appendix, where it belongs.

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