

Ask HN: Question about Google Tracking Disparities - Artifex

Hi HN,<p>Hopefully someone will have the knowledge and insight I lack to answer this. I'm also frustrated that there's no clear way to ask Google this question.<p>I've recently started to create hubpages to hopefully bring in some more revenue streams on the side - I'm not deluded into thinking I'll make a million bucks mind you, but the articles are high quality and informative, so I feel I'm providing a valuable service.<p>But the visitor metric tracking disparities between Hubpages, Google analytics, and google adsense are terrible!<p>On one particular hub, I see from the past seven days:<p>Hubpage visitor count: 82 page views<p>Google analytics: 50 visitors/65 page views<p>Google Adsense: 25 pageviews. (wtf!?!?)<p>Tracking codes and everything seem to be installed right (Hubpages does not make this hard). It would seem like Google's trying to game me. What's with the disparity? Is this because of ad-blockers?<p>Note: I've also seen this disparity in Google's own tracking with my own self-hosted sites in the past. So does anyone have any insight in to what's going on?
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byoung2
Hubpage visitor count will be higher because it counts requests on the server
side, including page views where the user had Javascript disabled, or left the
page before the Google trackpageview event fired.

Google Analytics should accurately count visitors who have Javascript enabled,
which is a subset of all users. Even then, sometimes Analytics loads, but the
trackpageview event might not fire before the visitor leaves the page
(sometimes this results in a 0:00 time on site, if the pageview is counted,
but the timer event doesn't fire).

Adsense pageviews are usually equal to the number of Analytics pageviews times
the number of ad units on the page. So if you have 50 Analytics pageviews, and
one ad per page, you will get 50 Adsense page views. In your case, Hubpages
randomly selects to show either your Adsense code or theirs, so you have 25
Adsense pageviews (and Hubpages has the other 25). That's Hubpages' revenue
sharing model, as described here: [http://hubpages.com/hub/Does-hubpages-take-
a-percentage-of-m...](http://hubpages.com/hub/Does-hubpages-take-a-percentage-
of-my-other-webpages-in-google-adsense--or-just-the-hubpages-ones)

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Artifex
Ahhh makes sense now! Thanks much. I knew they shared adsense revenue, but
didn't realize they were swapping adsense codes back and forth like that.

