Views Per Session tells you how many pages visitors look at (on average) when they visit your site.
For instance, imagine someone visits your site and has the following session:
Homepage -> Article A
This session included two views. Now another visitor arrives and looks at the following pages:
Article A -> Homepage -> Article B
This session includes three views.
Since the first session had two views and the second one had three, the Views Per Session would be 2.5.
“Views” not “pages”
There’s one minor detail you might like to be aware of.
We call this metric “views per session” and not “pages per session” because of the way it’s calculated. Take the following session, for example:
Article A -> Homepage -> Article A
This session includes three views, but technically, only two pages were viewed. Pages per session would imply the number of unique pages that were viewed (two in this case), and we feel that isn’t what most people are interested in when analyzing this metric.
What’s more instructive is the total number of views (three), so that’s why we call this metric “views per session” instead of “pages per session.”