Visitors. You can get page views from completely meaningless stuff like automatically generated traffic/bots or just reloading the page a dozen times (like in an iframe set to auto refresh every second). Visitors are a mark of how popular your site actually is.
Its visitors! If you have success in regulating the flow of visitors to your site, you're actually on the verge of getting very good results from your site! Remember, Action speaks louder than page views!
Yes, you can get thousands and even million of page views coming from a dozen of visitors and bots, which is worthless if you want to sell your site and base your stats on this fact. Same way, visitors that are worth the count are unique visitors, because many time a sole, same visitor can return to your site several times a day, and equally, stats may fool you saying you had 200 visits when those visits came from the same individual.
To be fair though, it's also interesting to see how many of your visitors are returning and to see it as a good thing. I mean, the same people returning over and over kind of indicates you've got an actual community and not just random people who visit once never to return.
You need both. You need a good solid core of visitors to help generate discussion and content... this helps keep your stats up with The Google and you'll end up in search results, which gains you more visitors to sell those pageview to your advertiser of choice.
It would have been nice if the OP could have given us his opinion. I think it is very much a personal choice kind of thing. I personally care more about the visitor count, but there are just as many who care more about how many pages a visitor looks at when they are on the site. As someone else said, visitor count is a guideline of how popular your site is.
I'm here...... I'm here.... I asked yhe quesyikn to know the ooint of view of more experimented forum owners What I yhink is the visitors stats show how well yhe forim is indexed and/or popular The number of pages views indicates how much members and visitors are interested in browsing the forum to find more information or simply because the forum is interesting
Visitors are definitely more important. You can have one visitor who make 100's of pageviews a day, so the pageviews can not always be a great indicator to the traffic coming to your website. If you want to impress potential advertisers though, pageviews can become more important.
Visitors because they're the ones generating page views for your site. The more visitors you have browsing pages, the more page views you're more than likely going to have. Also, visitors count a lot with the ad networks and pageviews usually generate your more money especially with CPM networks.
There is a simple rule for this that many should follow. You increase the visitors and then you increase the page views. Them simple fact is that with more visitors will come more views on the content your site holds.
Visitors. They are what really matters, because they give you visits, they promote/share your page and they are a part of your site. The more visitors you have the more visits you'll have, so it's a win-win.
Especially when you forum goes viral and word of mouth is one of the main traffic drivers. Also, when you get new links because of your visitors.
