Revenue per view: the small division that tells you to raise prices
Views and sales on their own hide the answer. Divide one by the other, product by product, and your next price rise chooses itself.
Two products, same three months. The first took 1,400 views and 12 sales. The second took 180 views and 9 sales. Which one deserves your next fortnight of work? Most people answer with the first, because 1,400 is a big number and 12 is more than 9. Do the division and the answer reverses. Revenue per view is a five-second calculation on figures you already have in your product analytics, and it settles pricing arguments that otherwise run for months.
Why views and sales mislead you separately
A view count measures interest and nothing else. A sales count measures volume and nothing else. Neither knows what anything costs, which is how a $9 product with a lot of curious visitors ends up looking like your best performer while a $120 product quietly earns more from a fraction of the attention. Both numbers are true. Both are useless on their own.
The hard part is that views are not equal. A product sitting at the top of your storefront collects views for reasons that have nothing to do with the product — it is simply first. Anything you linked from a post last week has inflated views from people who were never going to buy. So a low revenue per view can mean the price is wrong, or it can mean the page is drawing the wrong kind of attention, and the number itself cannot tell you which.
The second complication is sample size. Under a few hundred views, one extra sale moves the figure noticeably. Use ninety days rather than a fortnight, and treat differences of a few pence as noise rather than evidence.
Counting sales, or counting what attention earns
Ranking products by number of sales rewards whatever is cheapest. Ranking by revenue per view rewards whatever converts attention into money, which is the thing you actually care about when deciding where the next fortnight goes.
| Ranking by sales count | Ranking by revenue per view |
|---|---|
| The cheapest product always looks like the winner | Price is built into the comparison, so a dear product can win from less traffic |
| A product with heavy traffic looks healthy even when it barely converts | Heavy traffic with a low figure reads as a price or page problem |
| Nothing tells you whether to raise a price | A high figure with high traffic is a direct case for raising it |
| Products with tiny audiences look like failures | A small audience with a high figure looks like an opportunity for traffic |
| You promote whatever sold most last month | You promote whatever earns most per visitor |
| Price rises feel like a gamble | A price rise has a before-and-after number attached to it |
Running the numbers, then reading them
You need ninety days, and views and revenue for each product separately. Full analytics are available from Starter, so if you are on Free this is the point at which the paid tier starts paying for itself — the plans page lists what each one includes.
- 1Open your dashboard analytics and set the period to the last ninety days.
- 2For each product, write down three figures: views, buyers, revenue.
- 3Divide revenue by views. That is your revenue per view. Round to the nearest penny and keep two decimal places.
- 4Sort your products by the result, highest first. Ignore anything under about 150 views for now and come back to it next quarter.
- 5Add a column for the price of each product, so you can see whether the winners are dear items or well-matched cheap ones.
- 6Change one price. Only one. Leave it a full month before you touch anything else, then recalculate that product's figure.
- 7Write the before-and-after somewhere permanent. Two quarters of this and you will know your own pricing far better than any general article can tell you.
What each quadrant is telling you
- High revenue per view, low views: the offer works and almost nobody is seeing it. Do not touch the product. Send it traffic and put it higher on the page.
- High revenue per view, high views: the strongest case for a price rise you will get. People are choosing to buy in volume at the current number, which usually means the number is under what they would accept.
- Low revenue per view, high views: attention is arriving and leaving. The problem is the page, the price or the match between the two — rewrite the description and the first image before you consider building anything new.
- Low revenue per view, low views: a candidate for retiring, bundling or turning into a $0 lead magnet. It is not earning attention or money.
The two products from the opening
Product one is a $29 template pack: 1,400 views, 12 buyers, $348. That is about $0.25 of revenue per view. Product two is an $89 course: 180 views, 9 buyers, $801, which is roughly $4.45 per view. The course earns almost eighteen times as much from each visitor and it is sitting below the template pack on the page, getting a fraction of the traffic. The obvious first move is not a new product at all — it is moving the course up the page and pointing your next month of posting at it.
The template pack is the more interesting case. Fourteen hundred people looked and twelve bought, which does not read like a price objection so much as a mismatch between what the post promised and what the page delivers. If you raised it to $39 and sales fell to nine, revenue would land at $351 — effectively unchanged, with a quarter fewer buyers to support. That is not a promise about your page; it is arithmetic you can run yourself in a spreadsheet before you touch a single price. If you are on Pro, a countdown campaign is a reasonable way to give an old price a proper send-off before the new one takes effect.
You cannot divide numbers you do not have — put your products where views, buyers and revenue are reported separately for each one.
Get the numbersThe mistake most people make
The classic error is responding to a low figure by cutting the price. Attention arriving and leaving is rarely a cost problem; it is usually a clarity problem, and a lower price on an unclear page just earns less from the same confusion. Fix the description, the first image and the promise in the title, then look again. The other frequent error is raising every price at once after one good quarter. Change one, wait a month, recalculate. Pricing is one of the few things you can genuinely test on a live page without risking much, and the rest of the toolkit is only useful once you know which product is worth pointing it at.
As a rough working threshold, a few hundred views over ninety days. Below that, one sale swings the result too far to act on.
Calculate them separately. A $0 lead magnet earns contacts rather than revenue, so measure it on downloads and on what those people buy later.
Put it back. That is the whole point of changing one price at a time and waiting a month — the experiment is reversible and the cost of being wrong is one quiet month.
Partly. Use monthly recurring revenue per view rather than one-off revenue, and be aware that a membership's real value shows up over several months rather than in the first one.
One division, done once a quarter, per product. It will not tell you what to build and it will not write your copy, but it will tell you which product deserves your next fortnight and which price has been sitting too low since the day you set it out of nerves.
Set your catalogue up on one page, give it a quarter, then run the division and let it choose your next price.
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