24 hours are correct but 7 days, 30 days are not

Hi there!

Not sure how you’re estimating the views count for the rest of the time ranges. Could you please specify?

Let’s take this post:

https://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/change-management/12-reasons-why-people-resist-change/

This post shows 3.055 – Popular Posts – Last 30 days. And 1.092 for the last 7 days and 307 for 24 hours.

But Google Analytics says 10.239 pagesviews and 4.569 unique pagesviews
(30 days)

It same for picture for all post. PP are below on all post.

That’s a huge difference! How long have you been using WPP?

1 1/2 – 2 years.

It has been working just OK fine for a long time. After 2.3.5 the problem started and has not been fixed in 3.0

Back in “good old days” the WPP 30 days showed the same numbers that GA did show

Back in “good old days” the WPP 30 days showed the same numbers that GA did show

That’s because after 2.3.2 -I think, it’s been a long time- the way WPP updated views count changed from AJAX (Javascript) to template detection (check if single.php was loaded).

Since most spiders / bots out there can’t run Javascript (which is something I wasn’t aware of back then), versions prior 2.3.2 successfully filtered out their page views because the AJAX call was never executed. This is why the statistics would be close to what GA reported. After that change though, WPP started counting their page views as valid ones, inflating the statistics.

Of course, I wouldn’t have made that modification if I knew that. Unfortunately, a long time had passed before I realized what the problem was. WPP 3.0.0 could have been released months ago actually, but I decided to spend a little more improving the plugin and making sure old bugs were fixed for good.

Anyways, this is why the statistics were not that accurate. Unfortunately, what WPP has registered prior to 3.0.0 can’t be corrected so old stats (weekly, monthly, all-time) will still reflect visits from bots.

In your case, however, something’s odd. There should be more visits on WPP than on GA. You’re reporting that GA is actually displaying more views than WPP does. Are/were you using a caching plugin, by any chance?

A long post, I know. If you actually read all that, thank you for your patience hehe.

No I don’t use any caching plugin. I only use CDN (CloudFlare) but that can not be the problem.

Something on your site is / has been / was preventing WPP from updating the views count, but it’s hard to tell without further info and/or checking directly on your site.

Possible solutions / ideas that come to my mind now:

• Clear WPP’s data to have a clean start and detect if WPP is correctly updating the views count against what GA reports. I know, you probably don’t like this solution because you’ll lose your data. Another approach would be to delete only the cache data (last 24 hours / week / months) and preserve the All-time data.
• Keep using WPP 3.0.x for a month, and monitor how the stats behave during that period.

If the gap between WPP stats and GA is still too big after that (there will always be a difference, though), then I’d need to take a look into your site to figure out what’s going on.

Hi Héctor

Thanks for your reply.

I don’t have a problem in clearing all data. I just don’t see the point in doing it. How should that help?

It is quit clear that the plugin shows totally wrong numbers (I have been looking again at the numbers, they are totally wrong for 7 days and 30 days. 24 hours seems ok)

I don’t have a problem in clearing all data. I just don’t see the point in doing it. How should that help?

You’re right, I was a bit tired when I wrote that. Just go with the second option, stats should normalize after that time.

Stats has now stabilized – but on a VERY low level.

This post has 9.222 views (Google Analytics) but only 2.961 on WPP (30 days). Both are the same period (30 days)

https://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/change-management/12-reasons-why-people-resist-change/

It is the same problem for all other post.

How about last 7 days? Is there still a huge difference between GA and WPP?

For the same post as above GA shows 2.403. WPP only shows 1.145 (both 7 days)

While a difference between GA and WPP is something to be expected, what you’re reporting doesn’t seem right.

I’ll cook up a test version for you to try, and I’ll run some more tests myself. I’ll post back here by Sunday. I’m going to be needing your support to check a few things as well, hope that’s OK with you.

Thanks Héctor – Looking forward to your feedback