Ask HN: Question about Google Tracking Disparities

1 points by Artifex 16 years ago | 2 comments

Hi HN,

Hopefully someone will have the knowledge and insight I lack to answer this. I'm also frustrated that there's no clear way to ask Google this question.

I've recently started to create hubpages to hopefully bring in some more revenue streams on the side - I'm not deluded into thinking I'll make a million bucks mind you, but the articles are high quality and informative, so I feel I'm providing a valuable service.

But the visitor metric tracking disparities between Hubpages, Google analytics, and google adsense are terrible!

On one particular hub, I see from the past seven days:

Hubpage visitor count: 82 page views

Google analytics: 50 visitors/65 page views

Google Adsense: 25 pageviews. (wtf!?!?)

Tracking codes and everything seem to be installed right (Hubpages does not make this hard). It would seem like Google's trying to game me. What's with the disparity? Is this because of ad-blockers?

Note: I've also seen this disparity in Google's own tracking with my own self-hosted sites in the past. So does anyone have any insight in to what's going on?

byoung2 16 years ago |

Hubpage visitor count will be higher because it counts requests on the server side, including page views where the user had Javascript disabled, or left the page before the Google trackpageview event fired.

Google Analytics should accurately count visitors who have Javascript enabled, which is a subset of all users. Even then, sometimes Analytics loads, but the trackpageview event might not fire before the visitor leaves the page (sometimes this results in a 0:00 time on site, if the pageview is counted, but the timer event doesn't fire).

Adsense pageviews are usually equal to the number of Analytics pageviews times the number of ad units on the page. So if you have 50 Analytics pageviews, and one ad per page, you will get 50 Adsense page views. In your case, Hubpages randomly selects to show either your Adsense code or theirs, so you have 25 Adsense pageviews (and Hubpages has the other 25). That's Hubpages' revenue sharing model, as described here: http://hubpages.com/hub/Does-hubpages-take-a-percentage-of-m...

Artifex 16 years ago | |

Ahhh makes sense now! Thanks much. I knew they shared adsense revenue, but didn't realize they were swapping adsense codes back and forth like that.