Why Your Personal Analytics May Differ From the SHE Media Dashboard
When you log into your SHE Media dashboard there’s a chance your traffic totals don’t completely match with what you see in your own analytics account. As we work to get these two numbers more closely aligned with each other, here are some reasons why this happens and what you can do.
Common Reasons
1. In order for a pageview to be tracked in the SHE Media dashboard, the webpage of yours must have ads on the page. So for example, if in your Google Analytics account, the About page had 1,000 pageviews last month but that page has no ad units on it, then those 1,000 pageviews are not accounted for in your dashboard. Another example is when a site has a Shop, affiliate articles or sponsored content. A common strategy for those type pages would be to disable ads altogether to prevent competition between products.
What to do: Know which pages on your website have display ads. If you want additional ads on your pages, you can do that either through your dashboard, your Infuse plugin or by reaching out through our Intercom Support Service.
2. In order for a pageview to be tracked in the SHE Media dashboard, the user must be on the page long enough for our header code to load. Your own analytics visit counts as soon as the initial page load starts, but our analytics code doesn’t fire until the header code loads.
What to do: Look at the bounce rate of your pages. A bounce rate of 80-90% can indicate that the user isn’t satisfied with the content or experience of your page and is immediately leaving. Also look at your average time on page metric. If it’s abnormally low, that’s another indicator that users may be leaving before the page fully loads.
3. In 2019, roughly one fourth of humans on the web are using adblock technology. This means that they are able to view your content without seeing any ad impressions. This makes the page unable to be monetized, so the traffic would show in your own analytics account, but not in the SHE Media dashboard.
What to do: It’s unfortunate that users do this, but nothing can be really be done about it. You can safely assume that some of the discrepancy you see between the two accounts is due to adblock traffic.
4. Invalid traffic has been on the rise in recent years. When you hear the term invalid traffic, think search engine bots and other unsolicited malicious bots. Google does its best to block this traffic as well as block the ads from appearing but it’s not one hundred percent successful at catching.
What to do: One sign of invalid traffic (read more on IVT) is a spike or increase in traffic coming from the direct referral source. Look at your analytics account to see if there is more direct traffic than usual. It’s difficult to do, but if you can investigate further into where the traffic is coming from, you can filter out this traffic in your analytics account.
5. In certain countries outside of the United States, laws around display ads are different. For example, people in the EU or Canada have the option to not see ads on the internet. They can opt out of seeing ads from the SHE Media Parter Network or any other ad network out there.
What to do: Similar to adblock, there’s not much to do about it. This should make up a very small amount of the discrepancy unless a large amount of your traffic is coming from outside of the U.S. If you’re using Google Analytics, you can look under Audience -> Geo -> Location to see where your traffic is coming from.
6. If the difference between your own analytics and your SHE Media dashboard is roughly double, a common issue we run into is duplicate tracking beacons.
What to do: The most common culprit is multiple analytics plugins running on your WordPress backend. Look in your WordPress dashboard at your plugins and deactivate all except for one. You don’t actually have to have a plugin installed to implement analytics on your site. You can add a snippet of code to the custom javascript section and avoid plugins altogether.
As you work through these possible scenarios, the most important thing to remember is that your revenue is tracked by ad impressions and not through traffic, so your revenue isn’t impacted by traffic discrepancies.
If you still have questions surrounding traffic reports, you can reach out to the Helpdesk at support@shemedia.com and we’ll be happy to help you find the culprits.
article originally published o2.2020.