Viewed Content vs. View Count

This has come up a few times from internal support threads recently, both in regards to comparing to tools like Google Analytics, and in regards to the numbers themselves, so I'm going to repost some explanation here for public reference. Hopefully this helps explain what you are seeing:

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Web analytics (WA) and Telligent measure very different concepts, with very different methodologies.

• How: WA uses client side tracking.  Telligent uses server side tracking.
• What: WA tracks page views.  Telligent tracks content views.

When comparing client and server side tracking, client side tracking will always show smaller numbers. Specifically client side tracking does not count:

• Bots / Spiders
• Users who have javascript disabled
• Users with ad blockers enabled that block the tracking scripts
• Users who navigate away / close the page before it loads
• Viewing pages with multiple content items

As for what is being measured they're actually measuring two different things. WA measures page views.  

• If content's url changes (e.g. move to another forum, or change the thread subject), the content will move to new urls, effectively resetting google's view counts
• If content is spread across multiple urls, then the counts in Telligent and WA could differ significantly. 

For a forum thread, it has roughly 1 url per post/reply.  For example, a thread might have 183 replies, so there are 184 urls that display the same content.  In WA, these will be counted as 184 different urls.  In Telligent however, these will all be counted against a single piece of content.

No page view tracking methodology is perfect.  You should never focus on the actual numbers but instead focus on trends over time / relative comparisons.  

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This has come up a few times from internal support threads recently, both in regards to comparing to tools like Google Analytics, and in regards to the numbers themselves, so I'm going to repost some explanation here for public reference. Hopefully this helps explain what you are seeing:

==========

Web analytics (WA) and Telligent measure very different concepts, with very different methodologies.

• How: WA uses client side tracking.  Telligent uses server side tracking.
• What: WA tracks page views.  Telligent tracks content views.

When comparing client and server side tracking, client side tracking will always show smaller numbers. Specifically client side tracking does not count:

• Bots / Spiders
• Users who have javascript disabled
• Users with ad blockers enabled that block the tracking scripts
• Users who navigate away / close the page before it loads
• Viewing pages with multiple content items

As for what is being measured they're actually measuring two different things. WA measures page views.  

• If content's url changes (e.g. move to another forum, or change the thread subject), the content will move to new urls, effectively resetting google's view counts
• If content is spread across multiple urls, then the counts in Telligent and WA could differ significantly. 

For a forum thread, it has roughly 1 url per post/reply.  For example, a thread might have 183 replies, so there are 184 urls that display the same content.  In WA, these will be counted as 184 different urls.  In Telligent however, these will all be counted against a single piece of content.

No page view tracking methodology is perfect.  You should never focus on the actual numbers but instead focus on trends over time / relative comparisons.  

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Hi Steven. This is helpful information, but I'm referring to ALL Telligent based numbers. We have no WA installed whatsoever and are running an internal community that is locked down to real employees - no bots, crawlers, etc. The numbers I provided are entirely from Telligent's reporting dashboard.

Just for sake of visuals, here is a screenshot from our dashboard:

Can you show where you're getting the numbers for this statement so we can understand what you're trying to compare? 

Jillian Bejtlich said:

the line chart that shows the total number of views reads 3,601 - which sounds right

Also, there is an issue where if the Reporting ETL has failed, it can inflate view numbers, resetting reporting can fix this.  Please ensure the ETL is completing with out error and attempt to reset reporting.  Once reset run the ETL then check the reports again.

The Reporting ETL is a service that runs to extract the Community data into a Reporting database.  The location of the service will contain a Logs directory that will have logs from the service running.  You should be able to search these to see if there are any exact matches for the case sensitve "ERROR".  This will mean you possibly have the issue with inflated ContentViews.  

Reporting can be reset via the Reporting plugin in the control panel:

You can also open a support case for assistance with any of this.

Turns out this was the issue. The reporting was having issues that weren't showing up in the monitoring, but we're definitely causing inflation. I reset the extension as directed and we're back down to numbers that make way more sense. Thank you for your help!