Hi everyone,
One vendor has proposed a page views / month pricing for their online community technology. I’m curious if anyone knows both how many page views their community gets each month and how many users they have. It would be interesting to get a benchmarking range for how many page views a community has relative to how many active users are involved.
Slightly tricky in that pageviews aren’t all equal. How do you measure a ‘page’ in an infinitely scrolling environment?
@Darren_Gough and I were recently digging into some client stats and the pageviews recorded by the platform (which was Vanilla) were vastly different from those recorded for the same site by Google Analytics. That implies that they have some kind of algorithm for defining pageviews. I’d be interested to hear from @Adrian on that actually.
That said, going off GA data we get ~35 pageviews per active user per month (to the community part of the site, not the site in its entirety).
Hey @HAWK, that’s a good point. I know for some web hosting companies, they count ‘page views’ as including all the automated bots that hit a website, which can dramatically escalate the number of page views you are paying for (but that wouldn’t show up in GA). That’s very tricky - how a ‘page view’ is defined could lead to huge, unexpected costs. Or the definition could be changed at some point. I think that makes a page view-based billing much riskier.
@HAWK were the platform views less than the GA data? In that case it might be more beneficial.
This is a question I’ve been looking into as well, as our target (at least to begin with) is a smaller identifiable group.
Doesn’t GA only account for xx% of page views though?
I’m sure most of the stats it reveals has a disclaimer that this represents xx% of all visits? Perhaps that’s it?
Thanks for the mention @hawk and sorry for the delay. There will always be big differences when you compare analytics solutions. Google had a good page explaining this, that for whatever reason they have removed. Thankfully I kept a copy: https://archive.is/n3cm6
That should only be for deep-dive stats; then they use sampling. The overall stats should be 100% complete (and if you include a deep-dive in a dashboard, it should also be rendered daily with the complete data AFAIK).
Good save! What they say regarding trends makes complete sense.
That said, we’re talking differences of close to 10x in this case. Do you happen to know how Vanilla defines a page view?
@hawk a page view for us is the classic understanding of a page loaded by a user. This would include if they’re users hit refresh etc. I have seen some customers have JavaScript conflicts that have caused issues. I also know we’ve made several changes to account for some things, so if the customer you are working is self-hosting, I’d recommend they ensure they are using the latest version.
Other than that it’s kind of hard to comment without more details. What I can say is, we don’t normally see a 10x difference between Vanilla and Google. We usually fall within the standard margin of error.
Scrolling should not trigger a new pageviw. We don’t do the infinite scroll, only pagination. It’s an SEO choice. Although, if someone is using a third party (non-vanilla) created infinite scroll plugin, I cannot say how that would impact results.