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A
Anonymous
May 19, 2016
Solved

Duplicate Page View/Visit Issue

  • May 19, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 2959 views

We recently placed a form hosted in a Marketo landing page into an iframe on our wordpress site.  We were running analytics to see page views and conversions and were looking into Marketo and Google Analytics.

Looking into GA, the page in question had 1000 views but when we looked at Marketo analytics for the page views, there were over 4000.  This is very peculiar since these were taken from the same time frame.

Does anyone have any experience with this happening/insight into how to address this issue?  Marketo support thought that the issue was due to people refreshing the page, which can cause a duplicate page view, but doesn't make sense based on the immense difference.

Any feedback is appreciated and thanks in advance!

Jake

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Best answer by SanfordWhiteman

Pretty easy to see that there's a problem!  You have a script block that is reloading the IFRAME a second time after the page draws to add the query string:

var loc = window.location.toString(),
params = loc.split('?')[1],
iframe = document.getElementById('myIframe');
iframe.src = iframe.src + '?' + params;

It shouldn't be done this way. If you want the IFRAME to by dynamically loaded based on the current query string (which is already the variable window.location.search and doesn't need to be parsed in this way), it should be dynamically injected into the page only once.

There's most likely something else that's creating another 2x multiplier.  I'll take a look again later but this part must be fixed.

2 replies

Frank_Breen2
Frank_Breen2
Level 8
May 20, 2016

Jake, the statistics in Marketo are Page Views, GA can be split into Page Views or Unique Visitors, which report did you run? Refreshing the screen on a Marketo Landing Page will increase the Marketo statistic by 1. You're best using GA to get true statistics as Marketo's one's are very basic.

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
May 20, 2016

Refreshing the page isn't a "duplicate" page view, it's just another page view.  There's nothing surprising or unintentional about that, and I doubt it's your problem unless as Frank suggests you were comparing apples to oranges: sessions to views.

I wouldn't agree with Frank that Marketo (Munchkin) web analytics are any less true than Google.  However, if you are looking at views on a Landing Page report (not a Web Page Activity report) you will see some hits from bots in Marketo that wouldn't be reflected in GA (which, because it relies solely on JS, is better at discarding bot traffic).  However WPA in Marketo is based on JS tracking as well.  A 4x multiplier is not expected.

I'd like to know the URL of your page so I can see if anything else is going on.

A
Anonymous
May 20, 2016

Hi Sanford,

Thanks for the response.  This is definitely helpful and I'd be happy to provide the URL in question.

3 Steps to Sponsorship Success for Non-Profit Events

Appreciate you taking a look into this!

Cheers,

Jake

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhitemanAccepted solution
Level 10
May 20, 2016

Pretty easy to see that there's a problem!  You have a script block that is reloading the IFRAME a second time after the page draws to add the query string:

var loc = window.location.toString(),
params = loc.split('?')[1],
iframe = document.getElementById('myIframe');
iframe.src = iframe.src + '?' + params;

It shouldn't be done this way. If you want the IFRAME to by dynamically loaded based on the current query string (which is already the variable window.location.search and doesn't need to be parsed in this way), it should be dynamically injected into the page only once.

There's most likely something else that's creating another 2x multiplier.  I'll take a look again later but this part must be fixed.

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