How can you have more pageviews on a website than sessions?

[Firestarter-SEO]

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?

[Firestarter-SEO]

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!

[Christy-Correll]

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

[ThompsonPaul]

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.

[Hutch42]

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.

[DonnaDuncan]

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).

[Firestarter-SEO]

Here is the picture.

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[Hutch42]

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).