Google Analytics under reporting

[Gabriel Torres]

Hi guys,

Upgraded to 4.2.2, installed memcached + opcache, and now I am facing a very peculiar problem, which is Google Analytics under reporting our traffic.

How do I know this is happening:

1. From our ad management software (we use Revive), we can see that the number of views per day from a certain banner that is present in all pages of our website (and only  once per page) is far greater than the number of pageviews reported by Google Analytics. They should be around the same or even the opposite situation, due to users using ad-blocking software.

2. We use cloudflare, so I decided to add a new property in Google Analytics and link this new property with the Google Analytics app from CloudFlare. The difference is absurd, the number of pageviews reported by GA called by CloudFlare is almost double.

With that, I have a few hypothesis of what may be going on:

1. As on IPS Google Analytics javascript is loaded at the bottom of the page, pageview count is only increased if the user waits for the page to be completely loaded. So, if the user goes in a sequence of pages too fast to reach an article or topic, these pages with lists of articles/topics might not been recorded by GA. With CloudFlare sending the signal when the page is loaded, their trigger might be more accurate. But, even with this explanation, I find it intriguing that the difference between the two is almost of 2x.

2. On IPS the GA code is only inserted public pages, so restricted pages such as the ACP aren't counted. Again, this wouldn't explain the almost 2x difference.

3. There is a bug with IPS where the GA tag isn't being inserted in all pages. I couldn't find any evidence to support that.

4. The caching mechanisms we are using -- either opcache or CloudFlare -- might be somehow interfering with the GA code.

I don't know if you guys have faced a similar issue or have any idea of might be going on.

Thanks,

Gabriel

[Fosters]

Are you interested into testing a custom Google analytics app which is doing much more then the default IPS implementation?  It runs on server-side, so no client delays and it logs all the requests, even if guest cache is enabled 

[Gabriel Torres]

Hi @Fosters,

Yes, I would!

Gabriel.

 

[Surendra.S]

Hi Gabriel

If you don't mind, can you tell me what you concluded regarding this problem ?

I use IPB 4.1 and the moment I enabled Memcached, I think Google Analytics started under-reporting the traffic.

The number of Real-time traffic seems to be decreased by 40%.

I can't find why.

[Gabriel Torres]

@Surendra.S

Forgot to post a follow-up to this issue in this topic. The solution for me was to move the position of the Google Analytics tag. More info here:

Please note that I use IPS 4.2, and you should upgrade to the latest version. We've seen a huge increase in traffic with the 4.2.x series compared to 4.1.x.