Website Toolbox shows more page views than third-party analytics tools

A third-party website traffic analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, may show less page view usage than the Analytics section of your Website Toolbox account. That can happen due to multiple reasons described below.

• Most popular analytics tools such as Google Analytics don't count page views from search engines. Some search engine robots also don't activate JavaScript. This results in search engine robot traffic not being counted in third-party analytics tools while it is counted in your Website Toolbox forum page view statistics, causing a difference in reported statistics between the two different platforms. We include page views generated by a search engine robot because when a search engine views a page of your forum to include it in their results index, our system still has to process the request the same way it would for a normal human. The same amount of memory, CPU, and bandwidth is used.
• The tracking code is inserted into the Appearance -> HTML section of your Website Toolbox account so that it can properly track page views. However, there are many high-traffic areas of your forum which will not load the Appearance -> HTML content on the page. Examples of this include RSS feeds, javascript feeds, JSON feeds, and API requests. Pages that do not include code from the Appearance -> HTML section will not be tracked by the third-party, and would therefore result in incorrect statistics provided by the third-party.
• The Website Toolbox statistics page uses the UTC time zone. If your third-party analytics tool is set to use a different time zone, the start and end of each day would be different and therefore the statistics for each day would also be different.

The following steps can be taken to ensure that your page views shown in the statistics section match the statistics tracked by a third-party:

• Privatize your forum by password protecting your forum or only allow people who have signed up or been approved to view your forum.
• Ensure that you are not using the JavaScript or XML feeds to embed content on your website. (Refer to the Content > Feeds section of your Website Toolbox account.)

You can view detailed analytics of the recent traffic on your forum in the real-time page views section. It shows information regarding what pages the users that have recently visited your forum are viewing.

If you still need help, please contact us.