Invision Community 4: SEO, prepare for v5 and dormant account notifications By Matt Monday at 02:04 PM
z929669 Posted May 20 Posted May 20 (edited) I've been meaning to ask about this, and now I'm finally getting around to it. At the moment I type this, my IPS forums (I always am updated to latest version) show "Who's Online 2 Members, 0 Anonymous, 368 Guests", but GA says 83. Both supposedly record the number of 'users' within the last 30 minutes, but the IPS data is always 3-5 times the GA value at any given time. If GA is aggregating the data somehow, it's not by IP address, obviously, but I suspect IPS is counting unique IP addresses. I'm hoping someone can explain the discrepancy and provide some options to better align these numbers via IPS. I do have the GA integration service enabled with my tracking code snippet from GA, but I'm not clear whether or not this is informing the IPS count (or if not, what this is actually doing for me if it's not providing GA with the data for its drastically lower count). I forgot to mention, that my GA includes users of BOTH my forum and my mediawiki instance on the same domain, so the GA numbers should be larger in theory than what IPS shows me. Thanks in advance Edited May 20 by z929669 Added some info
Solution Randy Calvert Posted May 20 Solution Posted May 20 Google Analytics does not include bots (such as Google itself) or entities that do not download Javascript. IPB is not reliant on downloading of javascript to track activity, so they do see/show them. The GA view will most likely be a more accurate view of real "humans". David N. 1
z929669 Posted May 20 Author Posted May 20 7 minutes ago, Randy Calvert said: Google Analytics does not include bots (such as Google itself) or entities that do not download Javascript. IPB is not reliant on downloading of javascript to track activity, so they do see/show them. The GA view will most likely be a more accurate view of real "humans". Thanks Randy. I speculated likewise, but wanted other opinions like yours to prevent my speculation from becoming more of a personal 'fact' 🙂.
z929669 Posted May 20 Author Posted May 20 ... BUT, is it really expected that we have 3-5 times more bots visiting our pages than users? I'd expect something like 20-30 bots or non-human processes at a given time, but 290/370 seems really high. I suppose it's possible though, given all the 'forbidden' GET lines in my web server log. I'd LOVE to have the ability to filter them out of the IPS data.
Randy Calvert Posted May 20 Posted May 20 I just looked at my site right now… of the 90 guests, 45 of them are Google spiders. 18 of them are Microsoft. Again… antidotal, but not unusual for me. For many sites, bots represent more traffic than human traffic. Generally across the internet bots represent about 50 percent of ALL traffic online. https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/worldwide/security/press_release/bots-now-make-nearly-half-all-internet-traffic-globally
Jim M Posted May 20 Posted May 20 11 hours ago, z929669 said: ... BUT, is it really expected that we have 3-5 times more bots visiting our pages than users? I'd expect something like 20-30 bots or non-human processes at a given time, but 290/370 seems really high. I suppose it's possible though, given all the 'forbidden' GET lines in my web server log. I'd LOVE to have the ability to filter them out of the IPS data. Depends on the bot, depends on what they're trying to do, etc... There's good and bad bots and grey area bots. If you find them to be malicious or otherwise not wanted, you can contact your hosting provider to block them at the network/server level.
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