Viewed Content vs. View Count

Question

Something funky is going on with our metrics. In the entire time our community has been live (we're still in pilots), the line chart that shows the total number of views reads 3,601 - which sounds right. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see which pieces of content were getting the most views... and well... it doesn't make any sense. 
 My top pieces of content have 8,551, 8,466, 8,055, and so on with the unusually high and illogical numbers. In fact, if I export the list and tally up the views, I end up with 355,781 views total. I can very much assure you that is incorrect. 
 What is going on?

Brian Dooley · Accepted Answer

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.

Steven Heffner · Answer

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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Viewed Content vs. View Count

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