How many pageviews is a decent number?

Depends on what you're trying to achieve.

Attracting advertisers or sponsors?
Selling a product or service?
Capturing leads?
Flipping a site?
Self-gratification?

More info needed.

Frank hit the nail on the head. If your website is a BUSINESS, the only stat that really counts is PROFIT. If it's a capture page, leads and conversions matter most. If it's to flip it, it's based off revenue and profit. If it's for self-gratification, the more page views and unique visitors the better.

Ten thousand is a decent number for many, but it would be a real failure for someone that was involved in high stakes media buys that had spent big bucks on his massive campaign.

Frank is right, there is no way to judge your success against some "standard" or benchmark number . . . because there is none. What someone else does in his marketing has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what you could or should do in yours.

If you want to set your own standard against which to measure, try this:

Spend less on your traffic and marketing efforts than you generate in subsequent sales. If you can market profitably, then you can grow your business, optimize your marketing and selling process, and increase your net profit over time.

The very best to you,

Steve

Well I am with Frank Donovan On that... It Depends....
you will need 1000 or more views if you do
1. CPA
2. Adsense

All following this thread, thanks for comments. I see that I should have said what time frame for the pageviews. My bad. Now I don't know if people are answering per day, per month, etc. How many per day?

I found 332 per day the benchmark number you should strive for. Stick with that.

I found when it goes below 332 pageviews per day you really suffer.

If it goes to 286 pageviews per day you can seriously go broke, imho

I just don't based my site performance on traffic and pageviews, because the most important thing for me is goal conversion. You see I get millions of traffic in a month, same goes to the pageviews etc. but what bothers me is that I get millions of sessions and pageviews but not enough converions. Come to think of it, that's not a good number, millions to one thousand? It all depends on how your traffic or audience behave.

If you have Adsence in your blog, you need more than 10,000 visitor for small income.

.

87 is a good round number.

QUESTION:

Which would you rather have?

10 visits per day with a conversion rate of 50%
100 visits per day with a conversion rate of 2%

Number of visitors isn't the right metric to look at....

1 visitor a day, each 3rd visitor buys, each time a visitor buys, you make $10,000.

10 visitors a day, each 3rd visitor buys, each time a visitor buys, you make $14.87.

1000 visitors a day, each 3rd visitor buys, each time a visitor buys, you make $0.11.

842 visitors a day, each 800th visitors buys, each time a visitor buys, you make $1.37.

I can go on. But which of the above you like? (So, I can stop messing with the ones you're not likely to like.)

I would be more concerned on sales. It's all that matters - along with your cost per lead and cost per sale.

This way you can scale and make projections (or predictions) about how your customer base will respond to a high price ticket item that can dramatically increase your average value of each customer that you bring in.

Forget about some theoretical number. It's different for everyone. You will just have to keep driving traffic until you start getting enough numbers to give you what you want.

You won't know how much you need personally for you until you yourself hit it.

Depend on what is your website. (Product launch, Authority product launch, Niche site, News site...).

Well, these numbers have different values for different business, It depends on what kind of business you are running. If you want to blog and make money through ads, then any number is less, but if you have a product or service based website then relevancy of those users are more important than their numbers if you have a website which you have created to generate leads for your business then number of leads matters more than the number of visitors.

Back in the olden days (latter part of 90s), it was customary to install a "hit counter" on your site to show the world how many visitors you had. People did all kinds of crazy things to spin that counter, including substituting an animated gif of a hit counter spinning like the numbers on a gas pump.

Later, numbers like page views, hits, likes, etc. were dubbed "vanity metrics" because, for most businesses, they were good for massaging the owner's ego but little else.

The only monetization method I know of that relies on page views is the CPM model. You get paid based on the number of times your ad is shown. If you want to see this taken to sometimes ridiculous extremes, look at the home page of any newspaper. In the minutes it takes to load, count the number of ad servers the page accesses.

Which leads me to your question. I know, it's about time...

Start with your income goal, say $100/day to keep the math simple.

Let's also say that by stacking ad servers, you can generate $5 CPM (you make $5 for each 1,000 page views).

To reach $100, you need $5/1,000 x 20 M.

So a decent number in this example would be 20,000 per day. Less than that, and you don't make your goal. More than that is gravy for that day, and will help make up for the lower days.

Let's look at another example.

Say you're an affiliate with an offer that you know converts at 1% on your page (don't worry about the conversions someone else gets). Each conversion pays you $50. That means you need to average 2 sales per day to make your $100/day goal.

1% conversion means that 1 of every hundred buys, so you need 200 page views per day to make your goal.

200 page views per day would be a decent number.

Your decent number in the first example is 100 times the number in the second, yet both yield the same income.

Start with your own goal, run your numbers backwards, and calculate your own 'decent number', and you do far better than trying to match some theoretical benchmark.

Pageviews is really an important issue. You have huge pageviews that mean you have huge traffic.
There is no limitation of the decent number of page views.
Some people get huge pageviews but they are not happy because they can not fulfill their requirements.
Some people get very few pageviews but they are happy because they get quality traffic.

My most profitable site ever, by far, never got above 150 uniques per day. Some Sundays the conversion of visitors to affiliate sales was upwards of 40%. It was a hungry market!

Focus on quality, not quantity.

Brent