Have you noticed there is a difference between the number of page views on the community vs Google Analytics (GA) or the other analytics tool you are using?
This is because the view counter on our platform measures the total number of page views on a topic (not unique visitors) and there are no filters. So if you view the topic 5 times from the front end it will count 5 times.
While GA is far more advanced; you can include filters to block your own offices IP range from the results for instance. But the main difference comes from the fact that Google excludes views from crawlers, bots & spiders and so only counts 'real user' views.
Our platform doesn't do this, so we count both crawler and human views. Therefore, we suggest using Google Analytics as your main reference for views as this is the most reliable data source.
Page views on the community vs Google Analytics
is this still valid? Do you keep suggesting Google Analytics as the primary source for pageviews?
Hey I am pretty sure the Gainsight data has been improved since then. For instance the pageviews don't seems to increment for a user within a session.
We use Gainsight data for 99% of our analytics. While we use GA4 for what Gainsight isn't making available yet: searched terms analytics.
+2I think there are a few things to consider:
Yes, there is a difference in the data between Gainsight and Google Analytics, so don’t compare them directly.
From Gainsight, I use member data, as well as engagement data and Q&A, of course. Everything else I take from GA, because we use GA with our .com site and the data can be compared between the sites.
+2As mentioned, I know that there is a difference between Gsinsight data and Google Analytics.
However, now it seems that Gainsight data is unusable. For example, pageviews in Control are 74% higher than GA4 in November. There is also a huge difference between other metrics as well.
Has anyone else noticed the same?
Yes, we’ve noticed the same. The pageviews in Gainsight control are 50% to 80% higher than in GA. This difference is way more than for example the cookie consent denial percentage is.
+8Hey
I’d suggest reaching out to Support in this situation, especially since what you’re seeing feels unusually large or concerning. They’ll be able to gather the specific details from your instance and help identify what might be causing the discrepancy.
+2I checked the stats from January. There is a only 102% difference between Control and Google Analytics 4 when it comes to page views. 😊 Control displays too positive numbers.
Hey
Did you raise a support ticket for this? Let me know and I can take a closer look internally 🙂
+2Hey
Did you raise a support ticket for this? Let me know and I can take a closer look internally 🙂
No, not yet. Since we use GA4 as our main data source for traffic and views, this isn’t a critical issue for us. But still, the numbers should be closer to each other, no matter where they’re collected.
I will create ticket, some day. 😀
+2The 2 main things that need to be debugged are:
- What is a page view event in each system; do they differ, and if so how so? It’s impossible to get more permissive/inclusive than Google analytics. Every single time the header section loads for any given document.location value, that’s a page view. There’s no way to count more than ‘all’, so the only interesting question here is ‘does the community deduplicate events’. Assuming it only saves a single event for a given time stamp, issues in this bucket are very unlikely.
- Who is a user? This is probably where the issue lays. There is probably some session context in which Google loses access to the page load event and the community site does not. GA has blind spots in authenticated web apps for all kinds of reasons. It would be simple enough to open up that network log in your browser, and start loading pages in different areas to see where do GA and native tracking both send requests, and where does one or the other drop off.
In any case, short of failing to deduplicate, it’s really hard to over count. The odds are GA is ‘undercounting’ due to limited access in more or more areas or user session contexts within the community.
+8
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