Better pageview metrics with the new site traffic report

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke)]

We’re excited to announce a significant improvement in how we handle pageviews and present this crucial data to you. Our new site traffic report offers a more comprehensive and accurate view of your community’s engagement. Let’s dive into what’s new and how it benefits you!

Please note that we are in the process of rolling the new pageview tracking out to hosted customers, so not all sites will be switched over right away.

What has changed

We’ve revamped our approach to tracking and reporting pageviews to provide you with more reliable and actionable data. We now monitor the sources of individual pageviews and are able to detect if they came from a real browser or a crawler.

The new site traffic report combines data from various sources to give you a holistic view of your site’s traffic.

What is included in the report

The site traffic report includes the following four types of pageviews:

1. Pageviews (logged in): Pageviews from users who are logged into your Discourse instance.
2. Pageviews (anonymous): Pageviews from users who are not logged in but are using a web browser.
3. Known crawlers: Pageviews from identified web crawlers or bots (e.g., search engine crawlers).
4. Other traffic: Various types of requests that don’t fall into the other three categories, including other crawlers.

The default report view hides the known crawlers and other traffic metrics, so that it aligns with the pageview metrics displayed elsewhere in the dashboard.

Why this matters

This now give you a far more accurate gauge of actual traffic on your forums. Many crawlers are not easily detectable using user agent strings, so this report helps you gain a clearer understanding of who is visiting your forum.

This allows for better decision-making, easier growth-tracking, and an improved ability to identify trends in users and page views.

For hosted customers, this also means the pageviews that count toward your monthly limits are more accurate and realistic.

How to access the new report

You can find the new consolidated pageviews report in your admin dashboard For a detailed guide on how to interpret and make the most of this new report, please refer to our comprehensive documentation: Understanding pageviews and the site traffic report

We value your feedback

As always, we’re committed to improving your experience with Discourse. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this new report and how it’s helping you understand your community better. Please share your feedback and any questions you may have in the comments below.

[JonahAragon1 (Jonah Aragon)]

On two self-hosted installs I’m missing data prior to ~4 months ago now, although stats from that time period still appear in the other graphs. Do you see this in your reports?

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[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

Hey Jonah, what you’re seeing is expected as we only started collecting data in this new format recently.

Others may have slightly different experiences, depending on when they first updated to a version that began to collect traffic data in this new format.

Other data is not impacted by this change, which is why the other charts you see have data going back much further.

[darkpixlz]

@mcwumbly

what you’re seeing is expected as we only started collecting data in this new format recently.

I think at minimum the previous data should appear as logged in and “other traffic” for historical purposes.

[AstonJ]

Just noticed this and it has completely broken our pageview stats, showing a reduction in total views by around a fifth/sixth. Should this be reported as a bug?

As @JonahAragon1 and @darkpixlz also pointed out we’ve now lost years of page view stats including the total since the forum started - can these be brought back? Or could you give us an option to continue using the old system, either as an alternative or alongside this new one until any teething issues are dealt with?

[darkpixlz]

Yeah tbh this is a big misstep. Don’t know why it wasn’t even considered to keep it as “other” but here we are

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

not following, all the information is there. just click other and known crawlers and you will see all the numbers you saw before.

no information was lost, we did not purge any of the old tables, you can still get at the old data.

[AstonJ]

It’s not here Sam (at least not on two forums that I have upgraded to the latest).

I mean Pageviews here:

Last 30 is showing around a fifth/sixth less that what it usually does, and the same is reflected when you click on it and go back a few months/years (and then click on monthly): /admin/reports/page_view_total_reqs?end_date=2024-10-14&mode=chart&start_date=2019-09-14 - they are showing a 5th/6th less than usual.

Edit:

On a forum that is still on 3.3.0.beta5-dev it is showing the ‘correct’ and historical stats:

The Discourse pageview stats (even if flawed) were a great way to measure community activity/health over time because for the most part the system has been consistent. It would be a huge shame to lose historical data or for the formula to be changed now. If possible please bring back the old system so we can continue to monitor progress on the same basis, even if it is added as an alternative way to view stats (unless we can get the totals brought back in to match the old way - keeping it consistent is the best way to get an idea of community/traffic health).