Why would Stats show File Downloads from a page with no visitors and no views?

  • Unknown's avatar
    timpc4uc · Member ·

    Stats show File Downloads from a page on days when there were no visitors and no views shown in the Stats. Can you help me understand how that can happen?

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    The option to download stats as a CSV is shown on all stats module pages by default. It is not hidden when there are no stats, and shown only when there are stats to display. More info on downloading stats here: https://wordpress.com/support/stats/#downloading-stats

  • Unknown's avatar
    timpc4uc · Member ·

    Hello Jerrysarcastic,

    Thanks for replying. But, as far as I can tell, your reply doesn’t seem to have anything to do with my situation/question.

    I am trying to figure out why Stats/Traffic indicated that somebody accessed (downloaded) documents from one of my web pages on a day when Stats/Traffic indicated that nobody visited or viewed my website. I would have thought that a visitor would have to visit and view the web page to be able to download a document from the page.

    Thanks

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Media files and documents you upload to the media library on a public website get indexed directly by search engines. This means your document itself could potentially appear as a search result on Google, which would allow someone to visit and download the file directly, without ever having to visit the post or page on which you originally used that document.

  • Unknown's avatar
    timpc4uc · Member ·

    Hi Kokkieh,

    Thanks for your response. What you say makes a lot more sense to me. However, it appears that something quite different is happening. I hope you can help me figure out why it is happening.

    When logged in such that I am able to make modifications to my “Documents” page on my website, each time I visit the Documents page, 2 additional downloads are added to the Stats download count for 3 of the 4 documents available for downloading on that page — even though I did not download any of them.

    A possibly related problem is that, the 3 (out of 4) documents whose count is mysteriously and automatically increased by 2 each time I visit the Documents page, fully display the first page of the document instead of just a download button. The 4th document, which I have not edited and re-uploaded recently, correctly just shows a download button and does not have its download count automatically increased by 2 each time I visit.

    Another probably related issue is that each time I visit the Documents page, the “Update” button is highlighted in blue even though I have not made any changes recently. And clicking on the “Update” button does not solve the problem. It just then see a comment saying I have unsaved changes and when I click on the link in that comment it shows what I assume is HTML which I have no idea what to do with because I don’t want to make any unwanted changes.

    Sorry I couldn’t explain this more succinctly. I hope you can help.

    Thanks,

    Tim

  • fstat · Staff ·

    Hi Tim,

    What you’re describing is due to the fact that you have enabled the option to embed the PDFs. That’s a feature of the File block.

    So every time you edit that page and view those embedded PDFs they are registered as downloads.

  • Unknown's avatar
    timpc4uc · Member ·

    Hi Fstat,

    I can’t figure out how that setting got changed for those three documents in the first place. But your comments were very helpful and by making use of your information, the problem seems to be fixed now.

    Thank you very much,

    Tim

  • The topic ‘Why would Stats show File Downloads from a page with no visitors and no views?’ is closed to new replies.