When measuring a section performance from a website (it doesn’t matter its profile), we could commit the mistake of thinking that the one with more total pageviews is the most successful one. There are two things to take into consideration to understand which section or sections are the most successful ones and when we could say that the performance from a particular section is not acceptable.
1- When a visitor arrives to your “home page” has exactly the same chances of visiting any of the available sections, so measuring just each section landing page (or section home) allow us comparing which one is more attractive for our visitors. Measuring all the pageviews form each section drives us to measure things with different dynamic as equal, making incorrect decisions. For instance, if we have the section “chat” it could have the same Unique visitors than other parts of the sites (remember that we normally don’t measure internal UV’s because it could make us duplicate information) but the ratio pageview per visit will be close to 1 (1 pageview for each visit). On the other hand the same ratio from the section “our products” will never tends to 1, actually will have a bunch of pageviews for each visits. So saying that the section chat is less attractive just because of the low quantity of pageviews is completely incorrect because its own dynamic doesn’t allows it, so what we should expect from this section (mostly in a community website) is that the people spend lot of time there. The idea is comprehend which sections are more attractive to ours visitors.
2- On the other hand we could compare internal content (if its dynamic allows it) from different sections. I mean compare different content, from different section taking into consideration how comparable they are. So, we could compare the home of each section with the home from the other sections, and compare pageviews from one internal content of each section with one internal content form another section.
This technique help me a lot times of making very hazardous decisions, like recommending a client to cancel a section that in total pageviews seems to be unproductive.