Sudden incorrect increase in traffic displayed

  • Resolved IanBarrett

    (@ianbarrett)


    4 years, 9 months ago

    Hi

    Popular Posts is a great plugin that we have used on our site for over 4 years without problems.

    We just use the plug in to display most read in the last month and also over the last year plus most commented.

    We also use it in admin as a quick look at article performance.

    We mostly use Google Analytics for indepth traffic analysis for the business.

    We don’t expect Popular Posts and Google Analytics to exactly match but generally they are fairly close and certainly all the traffic patterns match.

    Last Wednesday 19th February 2020 Popular posts started showing huge traffic with at first 2x Google Analytics taffic and then peaking at 4x traffic on the Sunday.

    For the same period Google Analytics actually shows a small decline in both page views and our users.

    So something seems to have gone wrong with Popular Posts functionality on our site

    Key points:

    – Traffic patterns have always aligned previously between Popular Posts and Google Analytics
    – Since Wednesday things have gone crazy on Popular posts with huge traffic showing and peaking on Sunday (what should be our lowest day) – Google Analytics just shows our normal pattern and if anything shows a decline in traffic
    – Another unusual sign is that a normal day would see around 100 different posts read whereas now there are 500+ showing but with 400 having only 1 view
    – We have made no changes to the site in the same period except to add a category parent ‘Features’ channel to navigation – and the previous categories as children of ‘Features’

    My developer has no ideas about what is happening so I am hoping you can help

    One idea I was related to the new category channel – this effectively changed the URL of many of our posts from eg ‘https://policinginsight.com/analysis/{article slug}’ to ‘https://policinginsight.com/features/analysis/{article slug}’ – I wondered whether Google would be re-indexing our site as a result and would this show as traffic by their ‘bot’ on Popular Posts?

    Other than that I have no ideas – please help

    Thanks

    Ian

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author Hector Cabrera

    (@hcabrera)

    Hi @ianbarrett,

    To be perfectly honest can’t say what’s going on either. The plugin hasn’t seen an official update in a month and you said that things were working normally until last Wednesday so clearly nothing has changed on WPP’s side that might explain this behavior. Having a look at the access log from your server and see what it reports about the past few days might provide you / your developer some hints about what’s going on.

    Thread Starter IanBarrett

    (@ianbarrett)

    Hi Hector

    Thanks for your prompt response

    The traffic discrepancy has finally started settling down again today so I suspect my theory about Google re-indexing all my articles that changed URL might be the reason ie the Google bot has finished re-indexing – Google Analytics would obviously filter out the activity of it’s own bots I guess hence the disparity between Popualr Posts and Google Analytics

    Can you confirm whether Popular Posts registered bot traffic as human traffic?

    I think it would be useful to understand this

    If so is there a case for filtering out bot traffic from Popular Posts like Google Analytics or is this too complex? (Excuse my ignorance!!)

    Many thanks

    Ian

    Plugin Author Hector Cabrera

    (@hcabrera)

    Hey Ian,

    Thanks for your prompt response

    Don’t mention it, glad to be of help!

    Can you confirm whether Popular Posts registered bot traffic as human traffic?

    It’s a possibility, yes, but not very likely IMO. Here’s why.

    WordPress Popular Posts uses JavaScript (AJAX, to be more precise) to keep track of page views. One of the main reasons why WPP uses JavaScript instead of PHP for example (the other reason being compatibility with caching plugins but that’s another matter) is that the vast majority of bots out there crawling the web won’t parse/execute JavaScript code because all they care about is extracting content from pages as efficiently and fast as possible, being Googlebot one of the few exceptions that I know of (and even then Googlebot won’t wait forever until your pages have fully finished loading, if it’s taking more than a few seconds for your page’s JavaScript to be parsed and executed Googlebot will leave it and go to its next target.)

    Since most bots out there won’t parse/execute JavaScript code for whatever reasons I think it’s safe to assume that a visit from one of them won’t ever be registered as a pageview by WPP. Googlebot’s visits are probably being tracked by WPP most of the times (unless your site is slow to load!) but I don’t expect this to make such a huge difference in your overall statistics (and a proof of this is how generally similar WPP’s stats are to Google Analytics’, at least in my personal experience).

    Thread Starter IanBarrett

    (@ianbarrett)

    Thanks Hector for the explanation

    With the traffic settling down now, I’m going to just let it go until the next time it happens.

    I am convinced it is the Googlebot because 100’s of articles got 1 view which is very unusual for our site usually in a day there are max 80-100 articles read with 20 having large number reads 50 having 3-10 reads and the rest 1 – 3 views. so for 400+articles to have 1 view each is very unlikely and looks like a bot systematically visiting each article ( we have around 2500 articles in total so at around 400 per day that stacks up with the period of re-indexing)

    Only a theory but traffic data seems to support it

    Thanks again

    Ian

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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