Reply Box = Much Less Pageviews...

[MattRock]

I'm writing to see if anyone else has experienced this issue, and hope there may be some kind of solution:

Right now I'm using PHPBB (have Purchased XF and plan to migrate in the summer). With PHPBB, my pageviews per month are about 700,000. I realize that some of those pageviews are a result of the page refreshing three times for each new post (user clicks reply, which goes to a post page, user posts reply, which then goes to a page that says "your post has been submitted", then the page loads the original thread).

I realize that is very inefficient - however - it has made our pageviews look GREAT for advertisers.

When I deploy XF, because the reply feature uses AJAX and reloads within the page, those three pageviews will no longer occur, which I think should DRAMATICALLY affect our pageview numbers.

So my question is...

Is there any way to at least have the reply box load in a separate page, rather than the AJAX feature?

 

[Jake Bunce]

Is there any way to at least have the reply box load in a separate page, rather than the AJAX feature?

There is no configurable option to remove the quick reply box. And it is sort of an integral component.

Another option is to create an addon to extend this function:

XenForo_ControllerPublic_Thread::actionAddReply

You can use this code in your extended function to increment the view on reply:

		$threadModel = $this->_getThreadModel();
		$threadModel->logThreadView($threadId);

Or you can edit the file directly, but that will have to be redone when you upgrade.

 

[Ingenious]

I guess it depends on your relationship to your advertisers. If you take on direct adverts from companies in the same niche (who also use the forum) like I do, the improvements after moving to XF are plain to see and it sells itself as a better place to advertise. I also moved away from quoting page views many years ago because it's a silly and misleading figure for the reasons you state Look for trends that do increase after you move, like sign ups or unique visitors and quote those figures, or use analytics to look for an increase in time people spend on the forum, or reduced bounce rates. In any case, you can easily explain a drop in page views is due to more efficient software.

 

[craigiri]

Hah - I noticed the same effect - the more efficient XF results in fewer pageviews.


Of course, many of those old page views were bogus in many ways.......

It might be fodder for this or another thread to know exactly which actions that goog analytics considers a page load in XF. By what you said, Jake, I assume that most replies are not? Or just quick replies? How about most or all other actions - searches of all types, etc.?

This is something a new user might want to know....and I only found this one thread about it.

It's not our busy time yet, so I can't come to conclusions, but our unique visitor count is up over 11% compared to this time last year, while page views are way down. Time spent on site is down a bit also.

My opinion is that all of these metrics are good. The old forums had a very poor search function - therefore visitors had to poke around more.

Many internet marketers would be upset....but, in my case, I think the real secret to this internet stuff is to give users what they want in the most efficient (quickest) method possible, and you will eventually be rewarded. Google itself is a good example of that!

 

[Naatan]

Completely agree with craigiri, though your advertisers might not like the decrease in pageviews your users are what really matters. Removing quick reply would only hurt you in the long run.

Technically you could manually trigger page views with your analytical software, but that's shady business.

A good compromise might be to just disable ajax from loading the results and instead refreshing the page (albeit with a bit more logic than just "refreshing").

 

[Coop1979]

Why not create a new metric for advertisers like "content:advert" ratio? Show them that while page views might go down as a result of the software upgrade, the ratio of their ads being seen per page being loaded will increase.

Unless you're showing ads on the Reply and re-direct pages, but then you're going against any reasonable ad network's TOS, anyway.

 

[CTXMedia]

You could always reduce the number of posts displayed per page - this would mean more page loads to read the whole thread in XF. Of course this won't work if you're already on a low number, like 10 posts per page, but if you're currently at say 25 and you reduce it to 15 you'll effectively get "additional" page views that might help to counter the Ajax deficit.

 

[DeltaHF]

Never sacrifice user experience for an arbitrary statistic, you're only going to hurt yourself in the long run.

Besides, those pages you're trying to "recover" are worthless for advertisers anyway, and are only going to reduce your site's overall click-through rates and effectiveness. Would you rather have an advertiser say "Wow, they've got all those page views but so few people clicked on our ads...no thanks!", or "Wow, they only have 600,000 page views, but our click through and response rate was very high. Niche advertising rocks!" while you manage an increasingly active and happy community full of users enjoying a software that gets out of their way?