Visits greater than pageviews

[OscarMM]

Hi all, 

Something is happening in one of the sites I manage. In here we track only pageviews and click on links, and login initiated/completed. User ID is attached on login completed.

But for some reason I don't understand there are users with more visits than pageviews. How is that possible?

Also, if I check by page name (unique for each page URL) I can see there also pages with more visits than pageviews.

But if I check how tags are triggered in one of those pages, I can see only pageview triggers on page load.

Thank you,

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Hi,

First off, I assume that "Page Name" is a custom eVar that you set to track the page name value on both page views and actions (as opposed to the standard "Page" dimension which only tracks on the page view)?

That said, it almost looks like you potentially have a segment of users that are only triggering actions and not page views... so those actions would increment the visits metric, but not your page view metric.

Do your sites have any change to trigger an action before the PV, so that the users could bounce before the page view is fired? Do you have any fancy non-JS integrations, like embedded pixels in a newsletter to track "opens", or something like that?

Can you try doing a breakdown based on Custom Link? To see potentially what actions might be triggering?

[OscarMM]

Hi Jennifer.

I did breakdown based on Custom Link as you suggested and keep my investigation on that way. Yes, it looks there is something wrong in our tracking. We have some events triggering before pageview. Looks like sometimes, for some reason, the first event is triggered but not the pageviews. Our discrepancies happens mostly on pages after login, when triggered "Login Completed" event, immediately, on new loaded page even before pageview. It makes me thing you're right in your hypothesis.

Thanks,

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You're welcome... issues like this can be really tricky to find... and sometimes trickier to solve... 

It sounds like you are starting to make some progress now, and I will keep my fingers crossed for you.

[robinl39529461]

And what if you compare visit and occurences?

Because occurences is the sum of metrics Page views and page events. So maybe good to add those 4 metrics in your freeform.

Page view metric is only populated when a page name is set in the dimension page.

For the page event, you have to look to the custom link dimension.

Like this: 

And so occurences should be bigger than visits.

But it will mean that you have visit that consist only about events and not page view. And it may also be strange...

Robin

[Jennifer_Dungan]

@robinl39529461 while yes, you are technically correct that occurrences will be a larger metric.. the issue they are concerned about is that there shouldn't be visits that don't have any page views (in most implementations). 

It's not just about about creating a report (and I would argue against using occurrences in a context like this as most business users don't understand the concept - occurrences when using a column level filter to get actions without a specific associated event, yes... but full on unfiltered occurrence data may not be a good idea)..... 

Seeing visits higher than PVs is potentially indicative of a tracking issue, and they are trying to understand what scenarios can lead to such data.