Anyone else seeing big discrepancies between Google Analytics “page views” and API Calls on the dashboard these days? Particularly on our hosting or self hosting?
Digital Ocean hosting, tests-passed
9,789 Api Requests in last 7 days
(1,466 crawlers, 4,891 Logged in, 3,432 Anon)
6,532 Pageviews
Not orders of magnitude like the OP, but still a 50% increase from the google figure. The proportions hold up historically - google consistently reports ~1.5x as many page views as API calls.
We are seeing very big differences here:
The ‘pageviews’ according to Discourse are 65K, but according to GA they are only 13K.
So something is not right here.
I am working on reconciling this at the moment and am adding more internal diagnostics.
In particular I will ensure we set a header on every response that generates a page view.
Off the bat a big discrepancy is that analytics does not count web crawlers or anything that does not run JavaScript
Same here. For one day I had:
Google Analytics //
- 163 Sessions
- 61 Users (Logged and Anonymous)
- 1 863 pages views
Meanwhile the dashboard report:
- 4 800 Pages Views
16 from webcrawler an bots
2 500 from logged users
2 300 from anonymous
2.5x times more. That will put me in the 140k PV per month and the site is not launched yet. I am quite worry I will bust the 650k by far.
Since my original message I have reconciled multiple sites multiple times.
We simply count differently to what google does.
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)
Bots, JavaScript disabled are counted by us but omitted from Google.
It is worth mentioning that we added better bot user agent reporting plus user agent blacklist and whitelist support in 2.0 to deal with badly behaved bots of which there are .. many.
Has something changed recently? My Google analytics are showing a big drop in traffic but my Discourse stats do not reflect the same kind of drop?
We more aggressively throttle bots and crawlers in Discourse 2.0, particularly Bing which was pathologically bad. You can search if you are curious.
Hi @codinghorror, The thing is, my discourse stats have remained more or less consistent, it is my Google analytics which have dropped - at pretty much the same time as I added the advertising code. Wondering whether it is possible my ad code is interfering with the Google Analytics somehow.
@jerdog did you add any new plugins or code to the site? Seem to have recovered in your last screengrab?
The only plugin I added in that span of time is the GitHub - discourse/discourse-github-linkback: DEPRECATED: Links github content back to a Discourse forum · GitHub
It has begun to normalise again starting a few days ago which makes me wonder what happened to the codebase that might have contributed between June and late Sept?
Does anyone else see the same thing?
To me it looks like you had some sort of bug going where zero traffic was reported to analytics. I know we recently reorganised how we do analytics so it is very possible you still have the bug going but our new design works around your bug.
Hmm - ok I’m not seeing that across the rest of our properties so it’s a bit strange.
Il semble que Discourse signale une vue de page à GA uniquement lors du premier chargement de la page, mais qu’il suive en interne une vue de page à chaque fois qu’une nouvelle page de contenu est chargée en ligne.
Il semblerait plus approprié que Discourse signale une vue de page à GA à chaque fois que l’URL est mise à jour.
Par exemple : charger une discussion, l’URL est /t/topic/1000, faire défiler jusqu’en bas et la page suivante de messages s’affiche, l’URL est mise à jour vers /t/topic/1000/20, et une nouvelle vue de page GA doit être enregistrée avec cette URL.
Vous voulez dire la première page d’un sujet (les 20 premiers messages) ? Oui, c’est ainsi que cela fonctionne.
Oui, il semble que Discourse suive les vues de page en interne différemment de ce qu’il signale à GA, ce qui explique pourquoi les chiffres de GA semblent systématiquement plus bas.
Ce serait idéal de corriger cela pour envoyer une nouvelle vue de page à GA à chaque fois que l’URL change.
Non, ce n’est pas pour cela que les chiffres diffèrent. Voici pourquoi :
La moitié des gens naviguent aujourd’hui avec un bloqueur de publicités qui bloque Analytics, et les chiffres internes de Discourse peuvent les compter.
Ce serait étrange. Nous mettons à jour l’URL pour chaque message ; pensez-vous que la lecture de ce sujet justifie 40 vues de page ?
Tu as raison, mettre à jour à chaque message serait excessif. Cependant, le chargement de la page suivante de messages devrait compter comme une nouvelle page vue. (et utiliser l’URL qui se trouve dans la barre d’adresse est une solution naturelle pour cela.) Sinon, nous nous retrouvons avec des chiffres de pages vues dans GA bien inférieurs à ce qui représente réellement l’activité du forum.