Google Analytics and XF - Can anyone explain this...

[Divinum Fiat]

I don't get this. Can someone please explain this to me?

Facts based on Google Overview:
Age of site: 4 weeks
Google Overview: 2000+ unique visitors
Page views: 10,000+
Average time: 10:50 mins.
Alexa ranking 4 weeks ago: 0

Facts based on XF page and Twitter counts:
One page alone: 60,000 page views
Retweet of one page alone: 7000+
Alexa ranking today: 515,000

I have dozens of pages with these numbers, which should add the total page view well into the 6- or 7- figure. When I market to Twitter I market not the front page but a specific post, hence those get the views and the retweets.

Does Google Analytics only measure the front page in their 'overview' section?

If yes, then how can I get all the other pages included in the analysis? If no, Houston we have a problem.

Any tips and tricks to get Google Analytics to reveal what's behind the curtain?

 

[digitalpoint]

Well first of all, ignore your Alexa ranking... Alexa rankings are barely worth the bytes used to write the number. They *do* have some value if you are sub-10,000, but really only for comparing relative to other sites in your niche/industry.

Google Analytics overview is all pages/users/page views for your entire site (not just home page).

What page exactly are you seeing 60k page views and how are you measuring the 60k if it's not with Google Analytics? Also, what page do you see 7,000+ retweets for? That's an insanely high number

 

[Divinum Fiat]

Thanks for responding, yes! That's what I thought. Hence my curiosity. If Google stats are wrong then something is off with my Xenforo software, but I don't think so because I'm 14-16 hours days marketing my site, including Twitter.

So here are some of the pages and their stats with the numbers in this order:

PAGE VIEWS / RETWEETS / FB 'LIKES'

? / 7,116 / 4: Home Page: http://corefreedom.com/* (I do not know how to see actual number of visitors, XF doesn't seem to show this)
? / 1,707 / 6: Forum Page: http://corefreedom.com/forum/ (I do not know how to see actual number of visitors, XF doesn't seem to show this)
62,406 / 6,096 / 33: Widget Page**: http://corefreedom.com/pages/powertools/
11,657 / 1,044 / - : Just a post: http://corefreedom.com/threads/my-spiritual-journey-began-when.121/
8,911 / 971 / 2: Just a post: http://corefreedom.com/threads/kirlian-photography-proves-energy-and-love-between-people.75/
8,880 / 844 15: Just a post: http://corefreedom.com/threads/what-is-hooponopono.112/

You can view a few more like these at the popular page: http://corefreedom.com/popular/

* Based on the url shortener report the home page has gotten over 119,000 clicks, but I can't verify this since the XF software doesn't seem to show the numbers of the home page.
**I built a widget that contains 2 backlinks and is a free gift for other like-minded blogs and sites to download and place on their sites. When they do, because there are 2 different but complementary widgets each containing 2 backlinks, I get instantly 4 backlinks. Many of them are placing them on several of their pages. I just finished these widgets 2 weeks ago and hired someone to contact 80-100 other site owners per day to place them on their sites. Already they have been placed on a number of PR4 and PR5 sites. Maybe this has something to do with it? I have no idea how long link building takes, but even so, the numbers on Google and XF are way off.

What I don't get, and this is what my question is about, is why are the numbers of Google Analytics only showing such few visitors when Xenforo pages show so many more? I'm just trying to see if there is a glitch one way or another. Or is it possible that Google Analytics is not installed correctly and not capturing all pages? I'm so new to Google Analytics I'm not even sure what I'm looking at. Exit and bounce pages? OMG!

Any insights are greatly appreciated.

 

[digitalpoint]

There is definitely something screwy going on there. A single page with 6k tweets when you only have 47 members total? Something definitely doesn't add up. In addition, searching for the URLs on Twitter yields nothing (normally you would see the individual tweets0). Makes me think the tweets were there at one point, but then deleted by Twitter. Did you by chance have someone do "Twitter marketing" (i.e. have them spam Twitter with your pages)?

Your ratio of traffic to Tweets just seems way too high/artificial to me. A user to go out of their way to tweet the page they are looking at roughly 10% of the time ANYONE looks at the page is just craziness unless it was done artificially.

Google Analytics is going to be your best measurement of REAL traffic. Server-side counters you may have are also going to include bots, search engine spiders, etc.

 

[Divinum Fiat]

Yes so the outside Twitter marketing makes sense to the 'deleted' part. We got 3 new members today but remember, the site's only 4 weeks old.

What I still don't get is how, even an outside Twitter marketing campaign can get linked to XF 'reading' the page views. Wouldn't you think that a legitimate visitor would actually to come to the page in order for the retweet or page view stats to count? So how an outside campaign can 'manipulate' the retweets without coming to the actual page makes no logical sense.

The important thing is that I now know not to pay attention to those numbers but Google. Now I'm off to learn just how to read those reports.

Thanks so much, really appreciate it!

 

[digitalpoint]

If all the tweets did indeed come from an external marketing campaign and they were subsequently deleted from Twitter, I suspect you will see the Tweets count on your buttons going down to what they should be before too long.

You need to take into account that it may not be practical for Twitter to update those counters in realtime with the volume of traffic/tweets they are trying to manage. So they might run periodic batch jobs to update numbers or maybe once a week flush out the numbers that were attributed to spam. Not sure if that's the case, but those are pretty valid technical issues when trying to deal with billions of tweets all interconnected in some way.

 

[Divinum Fiat]

Hey DigitalPoint, Just wanted to tell you that I stopped running that Twitter campaign almost 2 weeks ago and the retweets or page views have not disappeared. And the Alexa ranking has gone up from 515K to 264K. I know Alexa isn't worth much, but it's still peculiar. I also finding that Google is not yet helpful since my site is only about 5 or 6 weeks old (things seem a bit delayed). So I installed StatCounter, find it a bit more accurate for now.

Still am puzzled about it all.

You've been very helpful, thank you so much for your kindness.