Better pageview metrics with the new site traffic report

Announcements
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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!

:information_source: 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.

Site traffic report
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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.

:information_source: 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.

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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?

2024-09-12 at 08.30.24
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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.

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

2 Likes