Olmyster Posted March 17 Posted March 17 Hello everyone, Since around mid-January we've been experiencing a problem with the number of views displayed on certain topics. Some topics randomly go from 50 views to over 1k views in a matter of hours. Some are even at over 4k. However, when I look at visits to the community via Google Analytics, I don't see anything unusual. I've reset the caches, disabled all plugins and installed applications, but it still doesn't help. Thanks for your help.
Jim M Posted March 17 Posted March 17 Keep in mind topic views are not a unique count of users and include any visit to the topic, whether real human or bot. Sounds like a bot may be hitting that topic frequently.
Olmyster Posted March 17 Author Posted March 17 2 hours ago, Jim M said: Sounds like a bot may be hitting that topic frequently. I've thought about the possibility of bots. But if that's the case, I should see a significant increase in the number of visits to my site. But that's not the case. That's why I don't think the bots explanation is the right one.
Jim M Posted March 17 Posted March 17 3 minutes ago, Olmyster said: I've thought about the possibility of bots. But if that's the case, I should see a significant increase in the number of visits to my site. But that's not the case. That's why I don't think the bots explanation is the right one. Google Analytics omits bots 😉 . You would need to check your server logs for actual requests to the server. Randy Calvert 1
Randy Calvert Posted March 17 Posted March 17 Remember… IPB is seeing counting how many times the topic was opened by ANYTHING. Google does not count things that does not execute JavaScript (which is what the GA tag is) meaning it won’t count its own traffic or that of other search type bots.
Solution Olmyster Posted March 18 Author Solution Posted March 18 Thanks for your feedback. I've just configured my site with Cloudflare to combat this problem. I hope it will be helpful.
Randy Calvert Posted March 18 Posted March 18 3 minutes ago, Olmyster said: Thanks for your feedback. I've just configured my site with Cloudflare to combat this problem. I hope it will be helpful. Just be aware that Cloudflare can skew numbers as well. If it serves a page from cache, it never went back to IPB to get the page which would mean that IPB can't count it. So any base page directly by Cloudflare WILL be seen by Google (since end users would still be getting the Google JS) but IPB will NOT. It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things... I say this simply to note that the two numbers will most likely NEVER really match. They're different things being measured really. Olmyster 1
Olmyster Posted March 18 Author Posted March 18 You're right Randy but a small difference in the number of views caused by Cloudflare is much more acceptable than a huge difference caused by bots.
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