Why do we seem to have so many views for so few visitors?
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Why might our number of page views skyrocketed in the last couple of months without a significant, corresponding change in the number of daily visitors?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hopefully, some of what I post will be helpful.
Our stats are not real time stats. For details see here http://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/ and note the views and viewers take hours to update.
Please do not assume that everyone who clicks a like button or a share button actually reads the post on your blog because odds are they may not. Also note that those who follow your blog in the Reader or by email don’t have to click into the blog unless they wish to.
Likes and shares and comments and reblogs and follows are not page views. In fact, likes, shares, comments and reblogs are completely misleading when you are talking about page view stats. Your followers and anyone with a WordPress.com/Gravatar account who is logged into WordPress.com can “follow” your blog, “like”, “share” and “reblog” your posts in several locations such as the Reader, without ever clicking into your blog and creating a single page view stat.
Logged in visitors using a mobile can read the full post without creating a page view stat. https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/wordpresscom-reader-show-full-text?replies=31#post-1373606
You can control the length of the entry sent out on your RSS feed here > Settings > Reading. Choose the “summary” setting for your RSS feed rather than to “full text”. That will compel followers who are not using mobiles to click into the blog to read the full post which will create a page view stat.
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I appreciate your response. I posted my question in response to a change in our stats. Before mid/late April, our visitors and page views ran more or less equal. Then for some reason in mid/late April, our page views each day jumped up into the 200-300s. But the number of visitors didn’t change at all.
So your post, while helpful, seems to address the opposite of our question, which would have been the case if our # of visitors increased but the page views did not.
Any other ideas?
Many thanks!
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I think you have 600+ followers – maybe they have became more loyal and are just doing a drive by to see if you have new stuff – or maybe people have started saving links for reference – but a sudden jump would seem to me to be a bit odd – but I have a jump in every spring for my site (boating is very weather and season sensitive) –
take a look at the page views – are they all to one Post or Page or are they generic to the home page?
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Thanks for your reply, auxclass.
hat’s kind of the funny thing: every single page has seen an increase in the number of views. We certainly have a handful of posts that have traditionally been more popular than others. But the view explosion has been more that every post we’ve ever written now seems to get viewed every day. That doesn’t seem possible. It seems like something more bot-driven than anything else, but I have no way of figuring that out.
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I’ll tag this thread for a Staff follow-up and they will examine your stats. Please subscribe to the thread so you are notified when they respond and please be patient while waiting.
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Look at your referrals – are the referrals also up? Are the referrals from search engines? A small change in a search engine can make a large difference in traffic –
bad news – checking referral & search traffic here sucks and it tough to do if you want to go back more than 30 days
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Hi there Ben!
The increase of pageviews may be attributed to the higher number of pages your visitors are viewing on your site.
Note that visitors are tracked by their IP address. If the same IP address returns to view your site within the same day, that will add to hits and pageviews, but won’t increase the number of unique visitors.
If you look at your stats here:
https://wordpress.com/my-stats/?view=postviews&date=2014-05-30&blog=20234818&unit=1
You can see a rough picture of what’s being viewed on your site. Your homepage carried most of the traffic while your blog posts received only a few clicks. This may be because your homepage contains full versions of your articles, and visitors found no reason to click on them. To get a better sense of which pages interested your visitors the most, try using the More Tag, so that only a preview of your posts appear on the homepage.
Here’s full instructions on its implementation:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/more-tag/
Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you. Thanks!
Andrew D.
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Thanks, Andrew, for the links and resources. But I’m not sure it’s really addressing our issue. Our page views and visitors seemed to be behaving in a way that made sense until the week of April 25th, 2014, in that the views per visitor made seemed to be accurate given how much we post and our normal traffic over a 3 year period.
But the week of April 25th, everything changed, and for no discernible reason. That week, we had 106 visitors and over 1,000 page views. While I’d like to think that our blog is interesting, I find it hard to believe that we had over 10 views per visitor. Since then, almost every week our stats indicate over 30 views per visitor. Again, I just don’t think that’s possible.
And while it’s true that our home page receives the most hits, I’m seeing page views on posts that are almost 3 years old that, according to our stats, are now being viewed every day. I’m not sure what this indicates, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else has a good idea either.
I appreciate everyone’s comments.
Ben
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Thanks, Andrew, for the links and resources. But I’m not sure it’s really addressing our issue. Our page views and visitors seemed to be behaving in a way that made sense until the week of April 25th, 2014, in that the views per visitor made seemed to be accurate given how much we post and our normal traffic over a 3 year period.
But the week of April 25th, everything changed, and for no discernible reason. That week, we had 106 visitors and over 1,000 page views. While I’d like to think that our blog is interesting, I find it hard to believe that we had over 10 views per visitor. Since then, almost every week our stats indicate over 30 views per visitor. Again, I just don’t think that’s possible.
And while it’s true that our home page receives the most hits, I’m seeing page views on posts that are almost 3 years old that, according to our stats, are now being viewed every day. I’m not sure what this indicates, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else has a good idea either.
I appreciate everyone’s comments.
Ben
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Hi Ben!
I’m noticing a different trend in your stats in the last two days where you averaged 2-7 views per user. Did you do anything differently recently? Again, the weirdness that you saw in the last few weeks could have been due to many factors, such as SEO companies querying your site, or users viewing your posts in reader apps. Rest assured that there is nothing to worry about! But please keep a close observation on your stats in the coming days, and see if anything strange pops up again. Thank you!
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Hi Andrew,
I’m just coming back to this after being out of the office for awhile. I don’t think we did anything different in the 2-day span you were referring to. And in any event, the odd mismatch between 100s of views with less than 5 visitors has continued up through today.
If the higher number of views is reflective of SEO companies, it would be nice if there was a way of filtering that out so we had a true reflection of how many people were actually reading which pages, and not just some bots or programs effectively viewing every blog post every day.
Many thanks,
Ben -
You could try using Site Meter (plain html version) – it also does Stats but it will mostly show how many page views per each visitor – (it does not do Galley viewing at all) – – that might show if one IP address is hitting you for 200 PV’s or something like that –
I get one or two visitor a day that sometimes to up around 20 or 30 PV’s each – once in a while 60 or so but not often – so things average out over the day
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Hi Ben!
I’m afraid that at this time, we don’t offer a way to filter out unwanted pageviews from specific visitors.
I would suggest signing up for Site Meter, if you wanted a different way of looking at your site stats. You may also want to look into Google Webmaster Tools to get more insights on your search engine traffic.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/
Let me know if you need anything else. Thanks!
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