Why is there a 10X Difference in Page Views - Discourse vs. Google Analytics?

I’m seeing about a 10 fold difference in page views between the Discourse metrics vs. Google Analytics metrics.

For example, here are counts for a representative page on one of my forums:

Here are the google analytics stats for the past week on the same page:

Now I know these stats are not apples to apples comparisons - the first one is “all the clicks ever for that page”, I believe. While the second are the past week’s results.

But still - shouldn’t they be in the same ballpark (or if anything, the weekly should be less than the Discourse “total views” number?

That number in Discourse is capped to counting 1 view per (user OR ip) per day. Google Analytics may be counting multiple views per person, and also have better methods of detecting whether two visitors from the same IP are the same user.

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This, and another factor can be whether a user’s connection is IPv6 enabled and working.

Situation where I saw something like this before was an instance where the admin didn’t include his server’s v6 address in DNS, so users were accessing Discourse on their v4 public IP, but Google Analytics was seeing them on their device’s v6 address so it was actually less capable of suppressing multiple views from the same user.

EDIT: ack! Just saw how old this post was. Not sure why it popped up in my new list O_o

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I’m having the same issue… but the other way around.

My GA4 shows 3,000 “views” for the past month and Discourse shows 10,000 “pageviews” for the same period.

What’s the issue here?

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This is normal, we count page views on the server. GA counts it as a reaction to the JavaScript running on the client. There are many types of pageviews that GA can not count.

  • Web crawlers not running JavaScript
  • Web browsers that block JavaScript
  • Web browsers that block tracking
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