Many clients have thought that page views was a measure of success in website traffic, but with new technology in use like AJAX, page views are not considered a real measure of site popularity.
I have always monitored unique sessions as my benchmark for success on a site. Page views may be preferable for some as it is typically a higher number and so looks better, but in truth, sessions is a more accurate figure.
Yahoo News which is linked to our post title discusses how even Nielsen/NetRatings is changing how they monitor sites and dropping page views as their measure of site popularity and moving to unique sessions. This is in part due to the introduction of new Web technologies which have significantly skewed page view results.
Personally I think that it is about time. Utilizing page views as your key metric simply does not make sense. I like to watch unique sessions and then average time on a site or average number of pages per unique visitor. I feel that this gives a more rounded and accurate view of a site’s popularity.