Shaneod
November 14, 2023, 7:58am
4
Here’s a more detailed post from before
Google uses JavaScript ajax calls to count page views. We work hard only to issue them on first load or when you transition routes (like move from topics to latest list)
Our Page View counting is performed on the “raw requests” made (accounting for a header that informs us when to count)
Hi @sam
Just trying to get my head around this in relation to GA4 and maybe to help the less technical users like myself here to understand the difference in layman’s terms.
Are you saying that when a user scrolls down a long thread and the next 20 posts load, GA4 is counting this automatic page load as A Page View? The user is not actually changing the page manually but essentially it is a new page of content, so it makes sense to count that as a pageview. On an older forum, you’d have had to click PAGE 2, PAGE 3, and so on in pagination, to work your way through a long conversation but the infinite scroll is doing this automatically for you.
Whereas the Discourse’s internal Page View metric is only counted when you actually click to a new Topic / Do a full change of page?
Or is that an oversimplification of what you mean?
I’m just trying to understand why my GA4 pageviews are so much higher than my Discourse ones.
This is for yesterday and it’s not even an extreme example as this is a quiet time on my site but it shows the difference:
So my GA4 is saying 39K Pageviews yesterday:
But Discourse itself is saying:
I know we had an explanation for this before that seemed to make sense but looking at the Data from Google’s Universal Analytics before changing to Google’s GA4 and now the GA4 data on the new setup, it definitely feels like there’s something askew with the GA4 data when on Discourse.
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