How can you have more pageviews on a website than sessions?
-
I have a website I work with and for the past month we have a reported 36,834 sessions and 25,490 pageviews? How is this possible? If a users comes to the site isn't that a session and a pageview? Or How can you have a session with out a page view?
-
Thanks all for the great responses. We actually had a very funky issue where we had set up some event tracking. The event tracking for some reason was preventing or not creating a page view when someone had performed the action. We have since fixed it and everything appears to be working right. Thanks for everyone's help with this, all the articles and comments helped us dig into this and pinpoint what was going on. Thanks again!
-
Hi Skyler! You've received some great responses on your question. Did any of them help you resolve your issue? If so, please mark them as a "good answer". If you're issue has not been resolved, we'd love an update, as well. Either way, we'd love to hear how things are going. Thanks!
Christy
-
You definitely have a misconfiguration problem with the tracking code on that site, Skyler. The giveaway is the fact that your report shows a Bounce Rate of less than seven percent. This low a bounce rate is effectively impossible for any normal website to achieve. (It's also very unusual to see such a flat traffic line with almost no weekly variation at all though that depend on the website and it's purpose).
That bounce rate problem is almost always caused by having the tracking script included more than once in the page code. This can occur when Google Tag Manager is added without removing the original tracking code, when Analytics is added via a new plugin without removing the previous code from the theme (common on CMSs like WordPress/ExpressionEngine etc). It can also be caused by having a misconfigured event tracker.
Usually double-tracking will actually cause the pageviews to be abnormally high, rather than low, so there may be several issues at play here. You can inspect the page source code yourself for potential issues, or you can use the Google Tag Assistant Chrome extension to quickly assess the way the Analytics tracking script is firing. I'd also strongly agree with Donna's recommendation to run the Screaming Frog check as well.
Hope that helps?
Paul
P.S. If you want to PM the site URL, I can have a quick look for you.
-
I have seen something like this before, it was a code error on the site, but they can be extremely hard to track down, if you can locate the page that these unknown page views are being seen at it will narrow down your search.
-
What Hutch said. You might have pages with no or a different Google Analytics tracking code in place. This article from Seer Interactive will explain how to use Screaming Frog to find pages with or without your tracking code (b-s.ee/1yNHBpe).
-
Here is the picture.
-
Can you post a screen shot showing this.
If what you are saying is true, the issue could be from spam traffic spoofing your GA account number or from an improper install on your site (caused by things like iframes or poorly coded scripts).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Modify Google Analytics Script To Only Cookie U.S. Sessions
I know I can filter sessions from outside the US, but is there a way to modify the GA script so that it doesn't cookie visitors to a site if they are from outside the US? Note, this is separate from having a cookie consent opt-in. Thanks in advance,
Reporting & Analytics | | FitzSWC
Fitz0 -
Can assumptions be made for (not provided)?
With the (not provided) numbers growing to the inevitable 100%, can we make any assumptions about what the (not provided) visits includes without sifting through 5 software programs, Moz analytics, Google Analytics, Webmasters Tool, etc? It seems like a TON of time and work to "try" and get (not provided) data/keywords from all the articles and heads of the industries I've been reading. That amount of time and work are just not viable for a smaller SEO or single SEO working with smaller budgets, so my question, can we make an estimated guess based on visits for local businesses that most are branded keywords bringing traffic? Or am I way off here? Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts or how you handle (not provided) with your clients.
Reporting & Analytics | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
What is The Bounce Rate of Single Page Website?
Hi All, I just want to clear some of my confusion regarding bounce rate. Bounce rate depends upon time. If yes than how? What will be the bounce rate for single page website. Single page website will have same bounce rate and exit rate?
Reporting & Analytics | | RuchiPardal0 -
If I am changing my domain for my website and want to keep using the same Google Analytics account to keep the data from the old domain. How should I proceed?
If I am changing my domain for my website and want to keep using the same Google Analytics account to keep the data from the old domain. How should I proceed? Do I have to start a new Google Analytics account for the new domain? If so how do I keep the old data? Or can I use the same GA account? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | brianhughes1 -
Best way to generate analytics reports for listing style website
I'm working on a website that includes dedicated pages for ~40 local businesses, and I need to be able to generate and export some basic reports I can send to each business. The data I need for each report is split between general sitewide data: total number of visitors to the site for month. number of visitors to each main category page what country they are from (main countries) - top 5 traffic source / keywords avg time on site As well as specific data for each individual page: how many people viewed specific total pages Time spent on individual page. Would this be possible with custom reports in analytics? I can see the number of different reports being difficult to maintain, especially as site grows. Anyone had expereince on a similar site of ideas on the best way to do this? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | zeald0 -
Website optimizer troubles
First, we would love to use the new Google Experiements intergrated into analytics but its not rolled out to us. We tried to get it expideted roll out to us but no luck... So we are stuck with a soon to be discontinued Website optimzer. I can't get past the first step however, I get the follow error: "The original page and the conversion page URLs must share the same domain.", see attached. The convertoin page is on a subdomain. There is quite a bit of help online about this. You need to tweak the script code. There is nothing about how to get past this page though. It simply says its a on a different domain (which its not) and won't let me go any further... Thanks! Website%20Optimizer.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | optimalwebinc0 -
How can I see the history reports?
Hi, I want to see the history reports for my ranking. For example I can how my website traffic changed in past few months using Google Analytics but I am not able to monitor the performance of my keywords on seomoz. Is there any way to do it?
Reporting & Analytics | | ashish2110