Bug beta 5 - Google Analytics increased pageviews

[bzcomputers]

After turning on beta5 and letting it run I have noticed a spike in reported pageviews on Google Analytics. I have been running Google Analytics for a couple years on the site and am very familiar with the expected pageview count and trends for the site and something is definitely off.

I run Google Analytics code (in the footer template), and 95% of my pages also contain Google Adsense Ads (varied places in templates), on top of that I run a Stat Counter script (in the footer template) that also reports pageviews.

Normally, the Google Analytics code and Stat Counter code are very close in pageviews daily and Google Adsense will be a few hundred pageviews less do to some pages not having ad code.

Stats for the last 10 days:

Date: Google Analytics - Stat Counter - Difference
Nov 10: 16478 - 16592 ; diff = 94
Nov 11: 13899 - 13900 ; diff = 1
Nov 12: 12804 - 12743 ; diff = 61
Nov 13: 13507 - 14303 ; diff = 796
Nov 14: 13092 - 13063 ; diff = 29
Nov 15: 12130 - 12235 ; diff = 105
Nov 16: 13997 - 14214 ; diff = 217
Nov 17: 18205 - 18222 ; diff = 17
Nov 18: 16715 - 14348 ; diff = 2367

A couple of the higher diffs above could possibly be attributed to days when I was testing DBSEO (beta3/4) for short periods of time, but I can't say for sure.

Yesterday Nov 18 DBSEO was turned on around 4:00PM local and was left running throughout the rest of the day. I continued to run DBSEO up until approximately an hour ago. This is what the Google Analytics pageview graphs look like from yesterday and today...



As you can see the spike yesterday coincides from the change from using vbSEO to DBSEO and the drop today (an hour ago) occured right when I switched back to vbSEO. From what I can tell both the Stat Counter reported pageviews and Google Adsense reported pageviews are unaffected - I'm just seeing this spike in Google Analytics. I also can't confirm whether this was occurring in previous betas because I didn't run them for any extended period of time.

 

[Fillip H.]

This may be related to the fact that you have already implemented Google Analytics via another way:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.cruisin.me/forum/ajax.php?do=analytics&v=420"></script>

I don't know if GA wouldn't be able to detect double inclusion of code and filter out the views, but to be safe I would recommend you stick with one mod or the other.

 

[bzcomputers]

I know the settings for GA copied over from vbSEO but it was disabled there and appears to be disabled in DBSEO also.

 

[Fillip H.]

I confirmed on your site that the GA code from DBSEO is not displayed, I had assumed you disabled it recently.

I can't see how this can be related to DBSEO, if it doesn't display any GA code then surely it can't be responsible for discrepancies in GA...?

We've also not seen such a spike here at DBTech, our visitors graph is 100% normal (save for that 2 day gap when I forgot to actually enable GA in DBSEO )

 

[bzcomputers]

I confirmed on your site that the GA code from DBSEO is not displayed, I had assumed you disabled it recently.

I can't see how this can be related to DBSEO, if it doesn't display any GA code then surely it can't be responsible for discrepancies in GA...?

I had always had it disabled but the analytics data was there from the import. I currently have vbSEO running that may be why you don't see the DBSEO GA running. I'll switch DBSEO back on. What code should I be looking for (that shouldn't be showing if GA is disabled)?

 

[Fillip H.]

_gaq will be displayed in the source somewhere if the integration is enabled.

 

[bzcomputers]

I think I tracked it down...

With vbSEO enabled and DBSEO disabled I don't see any reference to "_gaq"

With DBSEO enabled and vbSEO disabled I see the DBSEO settings analytics code that looks like:

<script type="text/javascript">
				<!--
					var _gaq = _gaq || [];

					_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.cruisin.me']);

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxREMOVEDxx-1']);

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'usergroup', '6-Administrators']);

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
					
					(function() {
						var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
						ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
						var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
					})();
				//-->
				</script>

This is with the DBSEO "Enable Google Analytics" set to no in all cases.


-----------------------------------

Edit: From what Google says you can have multiple instances of Google Analytics code, but not multiple references to "ga.js". In Google's words, "Multiple instances of ga.js might result in inaccurate data collection, processing, or reporting". So that is probably what I'm seeing due to the above code displaying. With the newer Google Analytics code (analytics.js) you can have multiple instances on a page without issue. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032400?hl=en-GB

I also noticed that you have reference to "_trackPageLoadTime" in the code. As of late 2011 this was deprecated and is automatically included in the data collection without needing to reference it specifically.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/changelog?csw=1#release-2011-11

I'm not sure if it makes a difference or not, but in your "_setDomainName" code, the domain name has a preceding "." (dot). In all references I have seen to this code the domain was always displayed without a preceding dot.

The reason I'm still using a 3rd party mod for GA is because the vbSEO built in code was older and was missing some of the newer options like...

Tracking code for Social Plug-ins: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/methods/gaJSApiSocialTracking?csw=1

This comes in very handy for including site wide social tracking. You can track Facebook Likes, Facebook Shares, Facebook Unlikes, Twitter Tweets, etc. (Google Plus tracking is already included by default). Only one line of code per option and I think they would be popular additions/options.​

You might want to check out the newer Google Analytics tracking code I mentioned above, currently in beta (analytics.js): https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/ I haven't personally looked into it much but it's suppose to have some additional options and less restictions.

 

[bzcomputers]

Were you able to figure out this issue yet?

I tried working around it by changing the Google Analytics account number stored in DBSEO (to something other than my account). It seems to have partially worked. The pageviews seemed to have returned to normal, but the time on site (avg visit duration) and a couple other stats are still off. I believe these issues still have to do with the second "ga.js" on the page because with DBSEO completely disabled all stats return to normal.

 

[Fillip H.]

I've applied a patch to your site now

Sorry for the delay, I've been busy working on the sitemap (it took emergency priority due to issues discovered with leaving the old vBSEO Sitemap addon enabled when vBSEO isn't installed).

 

[bzcomputers]

Thanks for the fix. I'm actually seeing some GA stats return to normal already.

Is DBSEO going to work with the old vbSEO Sitemap mod or are you integrating something new directly into DBSEO? ...just curious because I was wondering if I was going to have to abandon the vbSEO sitemap mod and try to modify the built in vb4 version myself to deal with all the "extra-urls" from my custom pages.

I didn't see any issues with the vbSEO sitemap when vbSEO was disabled and DBSEO running myself. Was it just when vbSEO was removed the issues came up?

 

[Fillip H.]

Is DBSEO going to work with the old vbSEO Sitemap mod or are you integrating something new directly into DBSEO? ...just curious because I was wondering if I was going to have to abandon the vbSEO sitemap mod and try to modify the built in vb4 version myself to deal with all the "extra-urls" from my custom pages.

I'm actually using the vB4 sitemap mod as a base. What that means is that any extensions made to the vB4 sitemap mod should work out of the box with the DBSEO sitemap. The sitemap won't be stand-alone.

A lot of vBSEO Sitemap features will be ported over, such as the re-crawl frequency settings, Smart Priority and priority ranges.

I felt it was a better idea to work with the vB4 sitemap code as a base because not only can it ping to more search engines than vBSEO (I've also added Bing to my version of it), but it's very powerful in its error handling.

The first version of the Sitemap inclusion may lack some content types - I've got all the content types vB4 handle by default working, but there are a lot more options in the vBSEO Sitemap mod - and it'll definitely lack the front-end browsing and logging, but they'll be coming back in future betas

If you were to write an extension for the vB4 sitemap mod to deal with your custom pages, that'd be a good way of testing whether that extension will also work with the DBSEO version

I didn't see any issues with the vbSEO sitemap when vbSEO was disabled and DBSEO running myself. Was it just when vbSEO was removed the issues came up?

If vBSEO is removed and/or the relevant vBSEO option is turned off in the Sitemap options, the URL formats regress.


PS: Relevant to Analytics, Beta 6 will also add support for Google's New Universal Analytics (analytics.js) that some profiles can be switched over to right now.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2790010?hl=en-GB

 

[bzcomputers]

I'm actually using the vB4 sitemap mod as a base. What that means is that any extensions made to the vB4 sitemap mod should work out of the box with the DBSEO sitemap. The sitemap won't be stand-alone.

A lot of vBSEO Sitemap features will be ported over, such as the re-crawl frequency settings, Smart Priority and priority ranges.

I felt it was a better idea to work with the vB4 sitemap code as a base because not only can it ping to more search engines than vBSEO (I've also added Bing to my version of it), but it's very powerful in its error handling.

The first version of the Sitemap inclusion may lack some content types - I've got all the content types vB4 handle by default working, but there are a lot more options in the vBSEO Sitemap mod - and it'll definitely lack the front-end browsing and logging, but they'll be coming back in future betas

If you were to write an extension for the vB4 sitemap mod to deal with your custom pages, that'd be a good way of testing whether that extension will also work with the DBSEO version

I'll definitely see what I can come up with. One of my main groups of "extra-urls" is from vbDownloads and don't want to have them drop from the sitemap.

PS: Relevant to Analytics, Beta 6 will also add support for Google's New Universal Analytics (analytics.js) that some profiles can be switched over to right now.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2790010?hl=en-GB

Glad to see your supporting the new code right away. Now I guess I'll have to actually read up on what it can fully do!

 

[bzcomputers]

I'm not sure if it makes a difference or not, but in your "_setDomainName" code, the domain name has a preceding "." (dot). In all references I have seen to this code the domain was always displayed without a preceding dot.

You didn't comment on this, so I wasn't sure if it was overlooked or not. I just noticed in beta6 that both the old and new GA code has the preceding dot still so I figured I'd mention it again.

 

[Fillip H.]

It uses the value of the "Cookie Domain" setting, just like vBSEO does.