Uniques, Visits, or Pages?

[BNWFinance]

What is the most useful stats number to gauge traffic and why? I usually use uniques, but perhaps I should be looking more at "pages" since each pageview is an opportunity for a visitor to click an ad.

Some definitions from awstats (I use awstats and Google analytics):
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_glossary.html

 

[kyleirwin]

I've pretty much always just used uniques as reference.

 

[Ben]

I use uniques as a reference, but pageviews are important... especially if you run any cpm

 

[bluebobbo]

I use clicks. :2twocents:

 

[Andrew]

Uniques tells me how well the site is doing at attracting users
Pageviews tells me how long they are sticking around
Not really paying attention to visits

 

[MisterX]

Here's an interesting thing I found - I might be wrong, but this seems to be either a strange phenomenon or a great strategy:

flashyourrack.com (nsfw) is among the most expensive places to advertise on on avnads and they only have 5000 daily uniques. The thing is, they have some 13 pageviews per visitor and are somehow getting awesome CTR which actually makes the cost per click there only $0.02! link

This is one situation where pageviews & ctr combo really matter.

p.s.
Is there something I'm missing here ? I mean, there are sites with as much as 100x more uniques earning less than a half of the amount from their ads & with a worse cpc...

 

[Saadh]

The ads are only for how much people click, no? I mean they aren't real links as I'm assuming avnads uses javascript for their ad script. So maybe people in the popular site (which might not be as popular as they say) aren't as click-friendly as the smaller site.