Visits in Campaigns report exceed pageviews in Pages report in Google Analytics

[harrietsand]

We tag our links in social media posts with the source (i.e. Facebook), medium (Post) and campaign (i.e. kids funny sayings).

We often see in our Campaigns report that the number of visits generated by a Facebook post exceeds the number of pageviews for that linked to page in the Pages report

Has anyone else had this experience and why does it happen? Or am I missing something really obvious or doing something wrong in which case, please please enlighten me!

[MikeTek]

Hi Harriet,

I've only seen this a couple of times in the past, and I was always been able to sort out what was up.

One thing I'd recommend is to make absolutely certain that the destination URL (and no other versions of it) is the only URL that's setting those UTM variables. In other words, ensure no additional pages are getting traffic for that campaign.

I'd also be curious to know how much traffic the site receives overall - if you're at the level where GA will actively sample your reports, I've seen sampling cause some wonky numbers, though it is usually proportional / within reason.

It's a few weeks now since you posted this question, not sure you're still vying with this, but if you're still stuck and can provide some more detail, I'll be happy to dig a little more.

Best,
Mike

[harrietsand]

Thanks Mike -- this kind of confirms what I suspected. We are a big publishing site, have way exceeded our data limits for the free version of GA and most of our data is sampled. This is not the only anomaly I see in our numbers but I wanted to be sure that there wasn't something obvious I was missing.

I'm currently testing Comscore's analytics as a possible alternative to GA but not liking the interface. If there are any analytics packages you can particularly recommend, please let me know.

[MikeTek]

Hi Harriet,

Have you considered going GA Premium? It certainly isn't cheap $150k/yr, but the platform is proven and continues to improve. I don't know where comScore's pricing is at - I'm assuming it's less expensive than GA Premium.

Two alternatives I'd recommend looking into:

• Chartbeat for Editorial
• Parse.ly

I haven't had the chance to use either of these first-hand yet, but I've heard good things, they're designed for publishers and the interface/reporting looks good.

I'd be interested to hear what you land on and why, if you care to circle back in this thread.

Best of Luck,
Mike

[harrietsand]

Thanks for the recommendations Mike. We are considering GA Premium among others and Chartbeat too.