Tracking URLs with hashes as pageviews

[Handel]

I had a slideshow plugin, which showed paginated post as slides, with urls being xxxx.com/1 /2, etc. After implementing this, my pagevies quadrupled in Google Analytics, as every new slide was counted as a new pageview in GA.

Now I‘ve got rid of this plugin and implemented my own, which loaded all content as a single page, and used internal <div> elements to divide into slides. Everyting works really well. Urls are now turned to /post-title#slide1, /post-title#slide2, etc.

However, appearently GA doesn‘t count these as new pageviews. I was thinking that I could probably manage to forse to track these pageviews with Google Tag Manager, I even found someone calling these „virtual pageviews“ and showing how to automate google pageviews tracking via GTM.

So technically it‘s possible. For my own analytics is also fine. Question – what about all these CPM networks, which accept websites based on the their number of pageviews. Does these „virtual pageviews“ are legit from this standpoint. Or maybe I‘m going too deep and nobody actually cares?

 

[Steve]

If the view doesnt cause the page to refresh, the ad doesnt get reloaded, so no they dont count

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm confused. You changed the plugin because it was showing each slide as a pageview, but now you're tinkering because it's not counting it as a pageview?

Or are you just wanting to know if it's affecting the pageviews as seen by CPM networks? As @Steve said, unless the page is hard refreshing, the ad isn't going to refresh either, which will not count as an additional pageview.

I prefer the way you're doing it now, as a viewer of a site. As a webmaster, depending on the type of traffic and how much I cared about the site, I'd might want the page to refresh each time to get that extra cheddar.

 

[Handel]

Thanks for the comments. This is what I more-less expected. @Ryuzaki, I changed the plugin because of other reasons (slow, bulky, etc.). Pageviews was a side effect which I noticed.

I'm currently building my way up to 100k pageviews/month, next step - to 500k... to get accepted to some CPM networks. That's why I was confused how they take data of pageviews - from my analytics, or if they monitor their add impressions directly.

I'd probably code in the way to make page refresh after every 5th slide or so, to be somewhere in the middle.

 

[Handel]

To follow up on the topic, I have two examples:

https://www.whowhatwear.co.uk/browns-fashion-team
and
https://www.fitnessmagazine.com/workout/tips/fitness-for-charity-ideas/?page=1
https://www.popsugar.com/love/photo-gallery/37957345/image/37957348/You-have-so-many-inside-jokes-you-can-hardly-keep-up-them-all

The first website updates url as you scroll the page (ads slide1, slide2...) without adding traditional slideshow.
Why do they do that? What's the added benefit, if not pageviews?

2nd example - on these two sites whole page is not reloaded, but still - new content appears. Isn't this considered a new pageview? If they're not increasing pages/session with these kind of slides, why use it altogether?

Sorry if my questions sound silly, I'm just trying to figure out, how to increase pageviews and how to increase ad impressions.

 

[Ryuzaki]

The 1st one is triggering ad refreshes at certain scroll points. The benefit is added impressions on the advertisements without forcing the user to refresh the page, which feels tedious. This, to me, is an ideal implementation.

The 2nd one refreshes the ads every few slides, with the added benefit that some of the slides didn't have an image. They had a CPA form to fill out, like the slide about walking the dog, for instance. The slides look like they're just divs being faded in and out with jQuery. This keeps the user from having to refresh the whole page each time, which sucks.

The 3rd one forced a new set of ads on every single slide, without refreshing the page. This one is the one that's probably making the most money, since it was around 3 ads all above the fold getting full visibility on each refresh. As a user I preferred the first URL though, and as a webmaster with the added benefit of all the text they could cram in there.

It all depends on how you implement it. Your pageviews do not have to be tied in a one-to-one ratio with ad impressions. None of the pages you pasted have that going on.

It also helps if your ads are extremely fast like the 3rd page. The 2nd one had so many behind the scenes requests going on (it seemed, I didn't confirm) that my browser almost shut down by the 9th slide.

Focusing on pageviews in this fashion will render it a useless metric in terms of measuring your pageviews per session on non-gallery content. You'l be stuck looking at the number of unique sessions. If you want to measure how many slides people are rolling through, you could fire off an analytics event and call it something like "slides." You could also create new ad code just for the image slider pages so you can watch the impressions separately and make it easier to do split testing.

The metrics I'd be focusing on is ad impressions and ad revenue. I'd find a way to directly measure "slide views" instead of "page views."

 

[Handel]

Thank you Ryuzaki, a fantastic explanation!

It became much clearer regarding the principles and technical side of things. I've been digging a bit and realized I have to use Google DFP to reload ads with JavaScript. It is not allowed to do that with plain AdSense. I'll start implementing that and see how it goes.

My second concern is still pageviews. Let me explain. I have an image-heavy website with long posts. Current goal is to be accepted to AdThrive and some other networks, which require at least 100k pageviews to get in. My site is sitting around 60k pageviews / month now. However, once I implemented slideshow on popular posts, pageviews easily increased to 140k/month, as most of the readers click at least couple of slides. This is what I read in this forum a couple of times as well - add pagination to increase pageviews.

I'm trying to do pagination in the least obstructive way. So I changed the plugin, and prev/next clicks stopped being tracked as pageviews. Nevertheless, I've already made it work again using Google Tag Manager.

Hence my initial question - are these legit pageviews? In the 3 examples above - is every new slide considered a pageview? Can it be that I'll be accepted based on numbers, but then suspended because of lack of ad impressions? Or should I stop messing around and start more traffic leaking instead

 

[Future State]

I wouldn't compromise on what you want as far as user experience goes. It doesn't sound like it'd be too difficult for you to hit 100k a month.

I'd bet you could use the old plugin, get into the ad networks, and then revert back to the new plugin since at that point all they'll bother caring about is the ad impressions you're sending in. The only problem with this approach is most of these networks are notorious about "please wait while we verify your site" and then you fall through the cracks and never get in.

If all you care about is the money, you could make the switch to complete page refreshes and not look back, but I'm willing to bet you'd get more ad impressions by not refreshing the page than if you did. Probably a significant amount more.