More Pageviews on AVC Recently

I visit the various analytics services I use on this blog about once a week. For the past several weeks, I've noticed a significant increase in page views with not much of an increase in unique visitors. So today I took at deeper dive into google analytics to see what's up.

Here's the chart of page views/visit since the middle of last year
Pv per visit since june 08

You'll notice that pvs/visit have been flat at about 1.5 for a long time (really since I started this blog). But in the past couple weeks it has jumped to closer to 2.5.

Here's a shot of just the past month.
Pvs per visit since feb 16
Something changed on or around March 6th or 7th and I am not sure what it is.

I would suspect that Google analytics is now starting to see something it was not seeing in the past but I see the same effect on sitemeter and other analytics services.  Here is the sitemeter chart for the past month and the red bar is additional page views beyond the initial visit.
Sitemeter

So it's more likely that something changed with a specific service on this blog and my suspicion is that it is related to disqus since that is where the majority of the page views happen beyond the front page.

But that doesn't really make much sense to me since when you click on the comment link, you are getting another page generated from avc.com and the disqus comments are a widget within that page.

So I am scratching my head. I am curious of anyone out there has a better theory?

UPDATE: Mystery solved. This is an artifact created by disqus and facebook connect. If you have the same issue and want a fix, here's a post on the disqus blog explaining how to do that. Thanks to JoeLaz for solving the mystery for me.

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Comments (Archived):

  1. howardr

    Were there any significant changes to your visitors or bounce rate? From what the chart looks like your bounce rate must have decreased significantly, but if your visitor levels are the same then It would probably be an internal linking thing (like a link referencing an anchor to referencing a URL, or disqus reloading your page instead or using an iframe, etc).

    1. fredwilson

      WowHoward, you are exactly rightThe bounce rate dropped from 85% to 50% during the same two daysDoes that tell you anything more?

      1. howardr

        This disqus bug kind of gets into the whole “what is a pageview?” question. Users might be doing the same thing they always have been, but a small change creates and extra pageview in google analytics. Sometimes you have to look at other metrics to figure out if anything else has actually changed (Like daily visitors, etc)

  2. kidmercury

    just guessing, but i noticed disqus changes the way you login to make a comment. before i would type the comment, type my login info, hit submit, and teh comment would be posted under my name. not too far back, though — perhaps around the time frame you’re talking about — disqus cahnged things so that first you have to login, the page reloads, then you enter your comment. so i can see how that might create an extra page load and hence an extra page view using some analytic tools.just a guess.

    1. fredwilson

      Aha.I suspected it had something to do with disqusI should have known that but didn’tThanks Joe!

      1. BmoreWire

        Well, I think it’s partially a disqus bug but also because of disqus adoption and disqus facebook app. I just added disqus to a blog I built for a friend http://www.turtle-soup.com and the number of comments per post as well as unique traffic and page views is way up. Also, could be because they got into the tournament…..but I like to think it’s disqus (aaaand of course my amazing blog layout.

        1. fredwilson

          Probably all of the above!

  3. csertoglu

    With the recession, people are bored. Theres less to do at work for many, even if there is “work”. Here come the good blogs! 🙂

    1. fredwilson

      Nope. Its a disqus/facebook connect bug

  4. lawrence coburn

    Disqus should market this as a feature, not a bug. Who doesn’t want lower bounce and higher pvs?

    1. fredwilson

      I certainly was pleasantly surprised

  5. obscurelyfamous

    Without seeing the referrals, I can’t be sure, but this has the characteristics of the bug caused with Disqus and Facebook Connect. To verify, you can see if there are multiple visits coming from “disqus.com” and “connect.facebook.com”.Our implementation with Connect is as a “4th party”, which means avc.com tells Disqus to tell Facebook that someone is being connected, and then the answer is relayed back through the same path. This is using a new method than our initial rollout: a cross domain receiver is used on domains to tell Facebook “Everything is OK, proceed.”If sites have this cross domain receiver, everything is fine. If not, the page will reload as a workaround “pass.” This is not a bug per se, but a necessary (and unfortunate) byproduct of Connect+Disqus. There is a solution for sites hosting their own files. For this site, hosted on TypePad, we and Facebook are working with them to get the cross domain receiver hosted for everyone so this no longer becomes an issue.To clarify for everyone, stat repetitions do not happen if Facebook Connect is not enabled.

    1. fredwilson

      Thanks daniel. That’s a great summary of what’s going on

  6. jerome camblain

    Fred,I don’t know technologically speaking, but from the outside it should mean that you have managed to access brand new visitors. Indeed, as regulars we only come for the new post, having read the previous one the day before. So bravo for enlarging your readership.