Google Analytics and article read count

Posted by pkcho on November 10, 2010 at 5:13pm

Hello,

I was hoping someone could clarify the numbers Google Analytics gives me for my site.

I have the Google Analytics module installed and when I check out the stats, it tells me that such and such a story only had 14 pageviews (9 unique pageviews) over the course of a month, but the admin tells me it had 1,822 total views.

The discrepancy is huge. I find it hard to believe that 9 people (or IP addresses) are contributing to 1,822 pageviews. This seems to be the pattern for most of the stories on the site. Low numbers in Google, yet at least a few hundred in the admin.

Can someone help me make sense of this? If something is incorrect, what can I do to make it set things up correctly?

Thank you.

Comments

Bots

Posted by michelle on November 10, 2010 at 5:47pm

I'm pretty sure GA filters out known bots. If you compare GA to AWstats, there's a huge difference.

Michelle

Are you talking about the

Posted by pazzypunk on November 11, 2010 at 1:57am

Are you talking about the difference between what you see in analytics.google.com and what you see on the administration page for that module?

Actually, I didn't know there

Posted by pkcho on November 11, 2010 at 2:30am

Actually, I didn't know there was anything to view on the admin page for that module. All I see are some settings, no analytics. Is there somewhere else to view the analytics besides the GA website?

I wasn't aware of one either,

Posted by pazzypunk on November 11, 2010 at 4:15pm

I wasn't aware of one either, but your comment has suggested to me that maybe there was (I don't use the module, I have our tracking code embedded on our page.tpl.php file). Reading your question a second time, it sounds like perhaps you are talking about the back-end of your site versus the front-end?

One thing you could do is set it up in Google Analytics so that traffic from your staff's IP address does not count towards your total traffic (by creating a filter in your site settings).

Also, how are you segmenting

Posted by pazzypunk on November 11, 2010 at 4:16pm

Also, how are you segmenting "the admin" and the stories? Are you tracking all pages with the path "admin"?

I'm not making a distinction

Posted by pkcho on November 11, 2010 at 4:21pm

I'm not making a distinction at this point, though it's something I may look into in the future.

Thanks for your thoughts.

I'm responding to this

Posted by pazzypunk on November 11, 2010 at 7:46pm

I'm responding to this statement:

I have the Google Analytics module installed and when I check out the stats, it tells me that such and such a story only had 14 pageviews (9 unique pageviews) over the course of a month, but the admin tells me it had 1,822 total views.

What do you mean when you say "the admin"?

.

Posted by michelle on November 11, 2010 at 7:56pm

Probably the views count provided by the core statistics module, which doesn't differentiate bots from people.

Michelle

The content administration

Posted by pkcho on November 12, 2010 at 6:21am

The content administration that shows the content nodes. It displays the number of times the node has been viewed. After reading the posts here, apparently those numbers are absolutely useless.

Yeah, I don't look at those

Posted by pazzypunk on November 12, 2010 at 3:06pm

Yeah, I don't look at those at all.

Also, MikeyTown has a good point. Global Redirect is an essential module!

SEO

Posted by mikeytown2 on November 12, 2010 at 8:50am

Are you using things like Global Redirect? if not you really should as google most likely sees
example.com/node/8
example.com?q=node/8
example.com/about-us
example.com/about-us/
As different pages thus they get a different count.

Wow. That's nice to know. Are

Posted by pkcho on November 12, 2010 at 8:19pm

Wow. That's nice to know.

Are there any downsides to this module? Does it conflict with the path auto or path redirect module?

Thanks.

Nope! I've been using it with

Posted by pazzypunk on November 12, 2010 at 8:22pm

Nope! I've been using it with no side-effects.

oops, meant to reply to the

Posted by pazzypunk on November 12, 2010 at 8:25pm

oops, meant to reply to the thread above ...

Thank you everyone for your

Posted by pkcho on November 13, 2010 at 8:33am

Thank you everyone for your help and input!

so the view counts on drupal nodes are essentially meaningless

Posted by mwinchina (not verified) on December 21, 2010 at 9:54am

so the view counts on drupal nodes are essentially meaningless (unless you are interested in bot activity)?

Is there a way to change the view counts on the nodes to reflect "honest" views aka not by bots?

As it's a user-facing data point it seems more "honest" to report those view counts.

Huge discrepancy in page counts and Google analytics

Posted by edg on December 3, 2011 at 8:35am

I'm having this problem. For example, a new story posted today came in with a Drupal page count of 4125 views after 24 hrs.

G.A. had 968 views for the same story (aliased url).

G.A. didn't have any other drupal urls that could have been this same node.

So where does the discrepancy come in?

Really Interesting Discussion.

Posted by esafwan on July 4, 2013 at 9:19am

I had the same issue pkcho mentioned. Huge difference in the read counts. The weird part was that in some article the count was lesser that GA. I believe that has to do with something like the page being served from cache and Drupal being unaware of those reads.

From what I see above, I think Drupal Statistics is of no use when we have site that is cached. And the count is just an approx.(or maybe unrealiable) count.

The solution that I get from the posts above are:

Use google analytic or similar service.
If you need full control and transparency, i thinking hosting something like http://piwik.org/ is a very good option.
Use Global Redirect module for better accuracy.

Drupaling.