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
-
No matter what we seem to do, we can never get higher up on Googles ranks. What gives?
We are in independent car dealer in a small(ish) town in Arkansas. No matter what we do, we can never seem to get past the second or third page on Google's ranks. We have a blog, we pay for SEO help from dealer vendors, we have consistent information on our site, etc. etc. . I'm at a loss. I don't know what else to do. Based on our Moz Site Crawl report, we have 185 pages that have duplicate content. However, these are pages that publish our auto check reports for inventory that potential customers request from our site. I guess these auto check reports expire because when I click on the link from the Moz report it says it can no longer be displayed and to contact the dealer (http://www.rathautoresources.com/autocheck.aspx?vin=1C6RR7KT4DS539140)
Reporting & Analytics | | RathAuto0 -
I am tracking my domain e.g www.xyz.com to an existing google analytics account . I want to track www.xyz.com/blog separately in the google analytics account. How can I do that?
I am tracking my domain e.g www.xyz.com to an existing google analytics account . I want to track www.xyz.com/blog separately in the google analytics account. How can I do that?
Reporting & Analytics | | Windlass0 -
Google's Not Provided - What can I see and what can't I?
Hi Guys, I've been looking into my company's analytics's data recently to establish where most of our traffic is coming from. More so, I want to get an indication of the percentage of organic traffic that is coming from branded and none branded terms. Not provided takes up 80% of my organic traffic and the vast majority of keywords that are provided all mention the brand name. Does analytics's provide you with all of your branded traffic but just block others that it doesn't want you to see? Or is it just coincidence that the majority of the terms I can see are all branded? I am just trying to establish how strong our brand is and how much traffic the brand name brings against none brand terms. All help is appreciated! Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | Sandicliffe1 -
How can I redirect incoming links from an old version of my site ending in .ctlg and .ivnu?
My original site was published in 2001 using "version 2" software from Ivenue, the hosting company that I signed up with at that time. The site's structure was built in such a way that the primary category pages ended in the extension .ivnu. Product or item pages on the shopping cart side ended in the extension .ctlg. My site's name was and is [Lamplight Feather, Inc.](<a class="webkit-html-attribute-value webkit-html-external-link" href="http://www.tonyhill.net/" target="_blank">http://www.tonyhill.net/</a>). We built our business between 2001 and 2011 and by the last three years (2009 - 2011) of using their version two were averaging a million dollars per year in gross sales. We decided to "upgrade" to Ivenue's "version 3" in 2011 to take advantage of some more modern options and because their newer software created web pages ending in .html which we thought more desirable. We made the switch in late 2011. But it was a disaster. Traffic and sales dropped precipitously. For the past two years (2012-2013) our annual gross sales average dropped to $400,000. (Two other factors were involved beside losing the many incoming links and link juice we had built up over the years: Panda came in that fall and my little niche market (decorative feathers) was flooded with competitors.) However as I try to rebuild our traffic and business little by little, I am stumped as to how to redirect the many incoming links that went to our first site's .ivnu and .ctlg pages. I have constructed redirects for some of our current but changed .html pages like this and put them in the file cabinet and they work: For (example): http://www.tonyhill.net/feathers_c384589.html then But trying the same thing for (example) http://www.tonyhill.net/craftfeathers.ivnu still returns a 404. Is there something I am missing. Ivenue is useless in this matter by the way. Their "technicians" are no help. I plan to be migrating my site once again to a new hosting company and hope to solve this problem before then. Thanks for the attention, Tony Hill This is an example from Google Webmaster of the type of links that show up as 404's that I would like to redirect: | URL: | http://www.tonyhill.net/productCat96521.ctlg | | | Error details | Linked from | | <colgroup><col></colgroup>
Reporting & Analytics | | featherman
| http://www.tonyhill.net/productCat43986.ctlg |
| http://forum.muppetcentral.com/showthread.php?t=21416&page=2 |
| http://www.cosplay.com/showthread.php?p=3832751 |
| http://forum.muppetcentral.com/showthread.php?t=21416&page=2&highlight=fur |
| http://www.muppetcentral.com/forum/threads/puppeteers-resources-links.19330/page-2 |
| http://www.muppetcentral.com/forum/threads/how-do-you-like-my-puppets.18549/page-2 | | | | |0 -
March 1st Decline in Visits and Pageviews
This site was upgraded from Joomla 1 to Joomla 3 and launched on Feb 27th. The SEF structure has not changed. The extension sh404sef tracks the 404s and there are only a few dozen from mistyped urls, so I have to assume the historical ranking has not been affected. How can I figure out why there is such a decline on March 1st from 4400 to 1500 visits? Is it coincidence after the new launch or did something happen with google on March 1st? http://transitionconsultants.com Screenshot%202014-04-11%2009.47.05.png
Reporting & Analytics | | modernmagic0 -
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 -
How to track clicks and "impressions" on a certain botton on my website.
I would like to track the amount of impressions on all pages in a "sub category" doman.com/subcategory/all-impressions-to-these-pages and clicks to a certain button for a contact form. I know that I can add snipets to my analytics code but I'm not sure how to and witch snipet to include. Is it possible?
Reporting & Analytics | | SuperlativB0