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
-
Tracking sessions from a sub-domain that is 301 redirected to main domain
Hi, one of my client is launching a new site on a subdomain newsite.brand.com.au but will use a shorter URL on the packaging on their new rang of products to be sold in supermarkets, prompting shoppers to visit xxx.brand.com.au. This specific sub-domain xxx.brand.com.au will be 301 redirecting to newsite.brand.com.au How can I identify and track accurrately all the visits coming from xxx.brand.com.au to newsite.brand.com.au?The visits from sub-domain xxx.brand.com.au will be attributed to direct channel I guess. Is it worth adding GA on this 301 redirected sub-domain xxx.brand.com.au or there another way to identify those visits on newsite.brand.com.au ?
Reporting & Analytics | | mecglobal0 -
Google Webmaster Tools, about multiple entries for your website
Hi I have a doubt about Google Webmaster Tools or Central as it is call today. I remember that google recommended to have one profile of your website for each domain structure. Let me try to be more clear one profile for http://www.yoursite.com, an other for http://yoursite.com, an other for https://www.yoursite.com, etc. Then in each of them we uploaded our sitemaps and cross our fingers. Now from my experience always the complete url have better index status from the sitemap. Now my question is, today as Google requested all our websites run under https, so conserving the other profiles is affecting how google index our pages? shall we have to delete the old profiles or is better to maintain them? Thanks. Pablo
Reporting & Analytics | | FWC_SEO0 -
Migrated website but Google Analytics still displays old URL's and none new?!
I migrated a website from a .aspx to a .php and hence had to 301 all the old urls to the new php ones. It's been months after and I'm not seeing any of the php pages showing results but I'm still getting results from the old .aspx pages. Has any one had any experience with this issue or knows what to do? Many thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | CoGri0 -
Analytics options for website builder
I'm working on a website builder with a few friends and we would like to track traffic statistics for each site built on our platform. We're looking for a solution to dynamically generate analytics for each site published on our platform. I've used Google Analytics for a number of years, but I'm not sure if it's capable of doing something like what we're looking for. Any chance someone could throw me a bone? Thank you in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | NickMacario0 -
Why is Google Analytics reporting 20% fewer goals than Unique pageviews of same thank you page?
This is really puzzling me and my research has not thrown out the answer. I have always understood URL goals to be unique pageviews of the thank you page you are tracking. UPVs and goals should both only be counted once per session... Has anyone else seen this issue? Goals were not set up historically so I wanted to use unique pageviews of the thank you page for year on year comparisons, but 20% is a big difference! Background There are multiple pages to track so goal is set up using Regex There is no mistake in the goal set up (honest!) The goal URLs all match the unique pageview URLs, there are no rogue URLs There has been no change to the site or the tracking set up Data is not being sampled It's a lead gen site in an area where multiple enquiries within one visit would be very unusual Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | McCannSEO0 -
My Domain Authority Dropped Dramatically..Can Someone Tell Me Why??
Over the last month or so my Domain Authority, my MozRank and MozTrust have all dropped off considerably. I haven't been doing anything different. So I don't know where to turn or what to do to get it back to where it was. The effects are horrible on my SEO. Can anyone out there tell me what it is I can do to why they dropped? Or more importantly, how can I improve it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Caseman0 -
Yahoo Site explorer: Different results for www & non-www domain. Can we merge these?
When checking our domain on yahoo site explorer, different results are shown for www.theprintspace.de and theprintspace.de. We have done a 301 redirect, as we want to optimise our www.theprintspace.de domain. However, we have a lot more backlinks for theprintspace.de. Is there any way of merging the two, so we don't loose all the linkjuice we get for theprintspace.de and use those links to optimise www.theprintspace.de? Thanks for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Waplington0