A Beginner's Guide to Page Value in Google Analytics

I recently met a number of people who are managing blogs or website for small businesses.  They want to learn more about Page Value in Google Analytics.  This is usually treated as an advanced topic but it does not have to be that.  Anybody can benefit from understanding the concept of Page Value.  Then you can decide if you want to use it by implementing the necessary setup.  If you are an advanced user of Google Analytics, this article probably isn't useful for you.

Where can you find Page Value in Google Analytics?

Let's first look at where you can find Page Value in your Google Analytics console.  It is under Content and then Site Content.  Whether you look at All Pages or a subset of the pages in a segment, by default Google Analytics shows Page Value in the right most column (see attached image).

Figure 1:  Page Value in Google Analytics

As you can see, the Page Values in this figure are all $0.00.  The reason is because I have not assigned a Goal Value or configured Ecommerce Tracking functionality for this blog.  Now, if you are still trying to figure out what Page Value is, your Page Value column is probably showing all $0.00 too.  Let's talk about what contributes to this Page Value metric.

Calculating the Page Value Metric

You might have seen this formula, that for a page

Page Value =  (Transaction Revenue + Goal Value) / Unique Page Views for the page

To understand this, you need to learn two other concepts:

1. Transaction Revenue
2. Goal Value

Transaction Revenue

If you have an e-Commerce site, like Amazon.com or the consumer self-pay healthcare services marketplace that I manage, you should use the Ecommerce Tracking feature in Google Analytics to understand how purchasers vs non-buyers are behaving on your site.

Part of implementing Ecommerce Tracking is to construct a shopping cart (or shopping basket if you are English) with items when a customer gets ready to buy from your site.  Each item type (e.g. a white 16GB iPad3) in the shopping cart has a price and quantity.  You submit the Google Analytics Ecommerce transaction with additional parameters when the customer completes a purchase.  There is a transaction revenue that you can calculate from the sum of (item price x quantity).

Each page that the user visits in the session before reaching the "Thank You" page is assigned the value of this Transaction Revenue.

Goal Value

On many websites, the webmaster or business owner wants the user to complete a certain task, e.g. submit a registration form to download a white paper or vote on a certain issue.  Usually, the URL of the page that the user sees when she completes such as task is assigned a Goal Value in Google Analytics, e.g. $100 or even $0.10.

In fact, there are four types of Goals that you can configure in Google Analytics

1. URL Destination
2. Visit Duration
3. Page / Visit
4. Event

You can see a more detailed explanation on the Google Analytics Help site.

The point for you to remember is these Goal Values are meant to be set with business value in mind.  For example, if you can convert 1 in 50 registered users into a paying customer and each paying customer is worth $10,000 to the business, the Goal Value for the registration "Thank You" page should be $10,000 / 50 = $200.

An Example Calculation for Page Value

Using a very simplistic example, a user visits a site, starting from the home page.  He visits 3 pages before completing the purchase worth $200 and sees the "Thank You" page.  This session is illustrated in the figure below:

Figure 2: A Simple Purchase Session

Remember that

Page Value =  (Transaction Revenue + Goal Value) / Unique Page Views for the page

The Page Value of "Shopping Page a" = ($200 + $0.10) / 1 = $200.10.

In a single session, regardless of how many time the customer visits "Shopping Page a", the unique page view count is 1.  Only when you consider traffic data from multiple sessions by different customers will the unique page view count be greater than 1.

More In-Depth Study of Page Value

• Is this helpful for you to understand Page Value?  Tell me what you need by posting a comment or using the Contact Me form.
• If you have a good grasp of the concepts, then you should read this Google Analytics Blog article about the Understanding and Using Page Value for the authoritative description of Page Value.
• Here is the Google Analytics help article on Valuing Content Using Page Value.  It explains the the calculation of a couple Page View more comprehensively.  Definitely read it before you use Page Value to rank the importance of pages on your site.
• I also found a well-written blog post by an e-marketing consultant specializing in Inns and B&Bs on how to optimize their sites with the Page Value metric.