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.
Sembra che Discourse stia inviando un pageview a GA solo al primo caricamento della pagina, ma sta tracciando internamente un pageview ogni volta che viene caricato inline un nuovo blocco di contenuti.
Sembra più appropriato che Discourse invii un pageview a GA ogni volta che l’URL viene aggiornato.
Ad esempio: carica una discussione, l’URL è /t/topic/1000, scorri fino in fondo e viene caricata la pagina successiva dei post, l’URL si aggiorna a /t/topic/1000/20 e dovrebbe essere registrato un nuovo pageview GA con quell’URL.
Vuoi dire la prima pagina di un argomento (i primi 20 post)? Sì, è così che funziona.
Sì, sembra che Discourse stia tracciando le visualizzazioni di pagina internamente in modo diverso da quanto riportato a GA, motivo per cui i numeri di GA appaiono costantemente più bassi.
Sarebbe ottimo risolvere il problema inviando una nuova visualizzazione di pagina a GA ogni volta che l’URL cambia.
No, non è questo il motivo della differenza. Ecco perché:
Oggi metà delle persone naviga con Adblock che blocca Analytics, e i numeri interni di Discourse possono contarli.
Sarebbe strano. Aggiorniamo l’URL per ogni post; pensi che leggere questo argomento giustifichi 40 visualizzazioni di pagina?
Hai ragione, aggiornare ad ogni post sarebbe eccessivo. Tuttavia, caricare la pagina successiva dei post dovrebbe contare come una nuova visualizzazione di pagina. (e utilizzare l’URL presente nella barra degli indirizzi è la soluzione più naturale per questo.) Altrimenti ci ritroveremmo con numeri di visualizzazioni di pagina in GA molto più bassi rispetto a quanto rappresentativo dell’attività del forum.