Page Views Decreasing

tjgrant · September 6, 2012

I noticed something on my Google Analytics reports for my SM site recently. Last year at this time I was getting about 2,000+ "page views" on my site per day according to GA. This year, its about 200. My business is seasonal. This year, after spending a lot of advertising this summer, I was planning on having a 25% INCREASE in daily page views. But instead, I am experiencing a whopping 87% DECREASE, despite having about the same number of visitors per day and the same amount of content (and, arguably, better content).

Upon further investigation, it appears that what constitutes a "page" has changed in SM. Last year, every photo had its own URL and as viewers moved from photo to photo, a new "page view" was recorded in GA. I proved this last year using GA's real-time feature.

But I noticed that this is no longer the case. It seems that now the gallery gets a hit, but as viewers page through photos, no new page views are registered by GA. Only one for the gallery, not one for every photo. Again, using GA real-time proved this to me the other day.

As I page through my photos in a gallery, I do see the URL change. But GA is only registering part of the URL -- only the gallery part, not the photo part. That is:

GA registers this and no more:
<domain name>/<category>/<album name>

But a photo URL is this:
<domain name>/<category>/<album name>/<album key and id>/!li=<photo id>&<photo key>

Has something changed on SM that would cause this change? I don't recall SM URLs looking like this last year. If so, this is bad. I was hoping to sell advertising space on my site this year but no one is going to pay to advertise on a site that only gets 200 page views a day, whereas they would pay for one getting 2,000 or more page views a day.

rainforest1155 · September 6, 2012

Do you use a custom tracking code our SmugMug's Google Analytics option? Make sure to use the latter and not to add any custom code. You can directly enter your GA ID in the account settings > stats > Google Analytics section.

Also include your SmugMug nickname so we could look at your site.

tjgrant · September 6, 2012

I did not enter my GA code on SM site. When I first started with GA I did so, but then removed it because of some issues. I forget exactly what they were, but there is a thread on dgrin about it. I'd have to look it up to recall exactly what the issue was. I think it had something to do wtih my results being skewed when I logged into SM (my own hits when logged in were being counted I believe).

I then changed and entered the code GA provides on my SM site. I thought I entered it in Advanced Customizer but I don't see it there now. Maybe that is the problem... perhaps I deleted it?

Everything worked great with this solution. I don't know when things changed. As I said I jsut realized it the other day. But for all I know its been happening for a while.

tjgrant · September 6, 2012

tjgrant wrote: »

I did not enter my GA code on SM site. When I first started with GA I did so, but then removed it because of some issues. I forget exactly what they were, but there is a thread on dgrin about it. I'd have to look it up to recall exactly what the issue was. I think it had something to do wtih my results being skewed when I logged into SM (my own hits when logged in were being counted I believe).

I then changed and entered the code GA provides on my SM site. I thought I entered it in Advanced Customizer but I don't see it there now. Maybe that is the problem... perhaps I deleted it?

Everything worked great with this solution. I don't know when things changed. As I said I jsut realized it the other day. But for all I know its been happening for a while.

Sorry, I do see it... its in my custom footer. I thought it was is one of the Javascript sections.

Page Views Decreasing

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