Why there is huge difference in Pageviews tracking number on discourse admin dahboard and on google analytics

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: