Page Views

[William King]

It seems that page views per chapter may not be working correctly?

 

I noticed a low page view for one chapter of a recently posted story of my own, which I put down to people missing out the chapter or going to the last chapter, which had higher page views, to find their place in the story. Anyway, that is not what prompted me to pose the question. 

 

It did prompt me to take a look at other stories and notably Unwilling, number five in the best sellers, top books, list. Looking at the page views per chapter, which are in the thousands, around 2k to 3k, until chapter nine, which has 26k page views! That is very unlikely, I think. Therefore, leaving aside accuracy of page views, I suspect something is going wrong with the count?

 

[Cia]

That chapter you mention from Unwilling is from 2015, so it would be unrelated to anything happening now. I just went through the first 3 pages of stories and looked at the stories with multiple chapters posting relatively consistently over at least the last few months to a year plus, and there's no consistent drop in page views per chapter that I can see. Just an fyi that a quick look at the current stories doesn't seem to show a big issue. I'm sure when the techs have time, they will look into the back end of the system to see if there's anything that jumps out at them that could be a bug.  

[A.J.]

I'm not saying it wasn't broke at some point in the past, but it doesn't appear to be broke right now.  I just tested with a story and a chapter and it worked flawlessly.  It updates about every 5 minutes so if you go to a chapter of your story, hit refresh 20 times, and then wait 5-10 minutes you should see the increase show up.

 

Regarding later chapters having higher numbers than previous chapters, that's usually people finding the site from the Internet and opening links not realizing it's not the first chapter.  Sometimes site activity is higher and if your story post coincides with that period of time, or if you post and there is considerable time before the next author posts a story/chapter, you can see a far greater response because of that.  As they say, out of sight, out of mind.

[Timothy M.]

  But a difference of 12-13 times (26k compared to 2-3 k views) seems rather strange.   Oh, well, it's not a major problem. And compared to all the bugs you had to chase down after the update things are running pretty smoothly now, right ?

[A.J.]

31 minutes ago, Timothy M. said:

  But a difference of 12-13 times (26k compared to 2-3 k views) seems rather strange.   Oh, well, it's not a major problem. And compared to all the bugs you had to chase down after the update things are running pretty smoothly now, right ?

 

As I said, it's not broke now that I can see.  That chapter is from April 2015 which was the old system.  It has 14k hits in our test system which is a one-time copy of GA we made back in early 2017.  That was well above the rest of the chapters.  Clearly that chapter has something special about it because it's received another 12k hits since then.  But I can't even say for certain that equals a bug.  What if it contains a specific series of words that makes it show up in Google searches?  Then I'd just be hunting down a non-existent bug that was the result of weird search formulas.

 

I could say the same thing about your reputation though.  Your's is 26, 806 and mine is 1,606.  But how many bugs have you fixed?  That number's likely wrong.  I'll go fix it.

[Timothy M.]

8 hours ago, A.J. said:

I could say the same thing about your reputation though.  Your's is 26,806 and mine is 1,606.  But how many bugs have you fixed?  That number's likely wrong.  I'll go fix it.

 

LOL, true, you should get a lot more likes for doing bug fixing and a lot of other stuff around here. If you made more posts about what you do, I'm sure your rep count would climb. But the main way to earn likes here is being an author. Which is the way it should be.   (The other one is to be very active in the chat topics.)

[William King]

@A.J. Could you explain why the number of chapter views doesn't equal story total story views? Does clicking on a story without opening a chapter count as a view? It seems a little odd.

[Brayon]

5 hours ago, William King said:

@A.J. Could you explain why the number of chapter views doesn't equal story total story views? Does clicking on a story without opening a chapter count as a view? It seems a little odd.

They are independent. Have been for the time I've been here at least. Page views for the Main Story page are higher from someone reading the description, and saying "Nah, not for me," and leaving.

[A.J.]

8 hours ago, William King said:

@A.J. Could you explain why the number of chapter views doesn't equal story total story views? Does clicking on a story without opening a chapter count as a view? It seems a little odd.

 

@BHopper2 has answered this question correctly.  Viewing a chapter or viewing the story page counts as a view.

[William King]

A suggestion: counting a click on the story page as a view is misleading. It would be better if the total views (page clicks) for chapters were totalled as the story page views. Given an intrinsic inaccuracy in page views, people clicking to find their place or whatever, to be as accurate as possible, progressing through chapter page views from chapter one until the latest chapter, the lowest chapter views should limit the following chapters.

 

Example:

Story views 220 views

Chapter 1 = 100 views

Chapter 2 = 50 views

Chapter 3 = 30 views

Chapter 4 = 20 views and limits following chapter

Chapter 5 = 30 views actual number limited by previous chapter to 20 views

 

Obviously no one is going to miss a chapter if they are reading a book, rather than randomly clicking. There is also an argument to be made for using chapter 2 as a limiter, presuming the always high numbers of the first chapter include those readers who drop the story. Although the author might want to know those numbers.

 

I think the more the page views approach the reality the better idea one has about actual readership, although I appreciate that this my involve some work to implement.

 

Thanks for the clarification.

[Cia]

Story views tells you how many times people have caught a link with your title somewhere/somehow and thought it sounded interesting enough to click on it to explore further versus people who click on your chapters because they follow the story. The read counts on chapters being accurate is important because it is good to know how many people "try" your story with the first chapter compared to continued read counts. And while the story views is not a totally accurate count, as I can think of a lot of times I click on a story to bounce around chapters as an admin, it does give you a general gist of things if you're exploring what kinds of content catch the attention of readers. Certain lengths of titles? Tags used? Categories? Blurb information and length? If you're interested in trying to explore the way your story details can help your story catch the eye of readers (a tenet of marketing, and often an idea of what kind of content sells or garners more feedback for future writing), the story views is important to be separate from just counting up the number of times people click on the chapters.

 

Overall, the way our story views and chapter view counts are counted is a simple way of letting those authors who care to put in the work to learn more about readers' preferences. 

[Timothy M.]

Don't forget some of us will read story of specific chapters more than once. In addition, authors will look at the chapter to answer comments, and then readers will access the chapter again to read the replies. I rarely consider story or chapter views as an accurate measure of number of readers.

Only likes and comments count for me.  Oh - and followers of my stories of course :') 

Edited April 26, 2018 by Timothy M.
clarifying the last part is my personal take

[northie]

16 minutes ago, Timothy M. said:

Only likes and comments count.

Yes .... from those members who bother. A high percentage of readers neither like nor comment. I appreciate some sense of how the story is going down. Even if the numbers are only a ball park figure. 

[A.J.]

17 hours ago, William King said:

A suggestion: counting a click on the story page as a view is misleading. It would be better if the total views (page clicks) for chapters were totalled as the story page views. Given an intrinsic inaccuracy in page views, people clicking to find their place or whatever, to be as accurate as possible, progressing through chapter page views from chapter one until the latest chapter, the lowest chapter views should limit the following chapters.

 

Example:

Story views 220 views

Chapter 1 = 100 views

Chapter 2 = 50 views

Chapter 3 = 30 views

Chapter 4 = 20 views and limits following chapter

Chapter 5 = 30 views actual number limited by previous chapter to 20 views

 

Obviously no one is going to miss a chapter if they are reading a book, rather than randomly clicking. There is also an argument to be made for using chapter 2 as a limiter, presuming the always high numbers of the first chapter include those readers who drop the story. Although the author might want to know those numbers.

 

I think the more the page views approach the reality the better idea one has about actual readership, although I appreciate that this my involve some work to implement.

 

Thanks for the clarification.

 

No number truly gives you a one hundred percent accurate representation for how many people actually read the content of the chapter.  We'll be rolling out a more extensive set of story analytics to authors later this year. Additionally, your suggestion would invalidate the statistics for those that post collections of shorts and poetry where a later chapter might legitimately be read more than an earlier chapter.  At this time I see no reason to make any changes.

[Myr]

6 hours ago, northie said:

Yes .... from those members who bother. A high percentage of readers neither like nor comment. I appreciate some sense of how the story is going down. Even if the numbers are only a ball park figure

@Timothy M.

 

I'll remind you once again that the vast majority of the people reading on the site are "guests" as in not member or not logged in and unable to like or comment in such a state.

 

 

[William King]

Taking account of all the points made, the page view numbers are more or less meaningless. My suggestion would not work for anthologies. Numbers of followers does show people who have read, are reading a book. It only represents members, so not the whole picture. If you apply the 80:20 principle, you could extrapolate, and probably get a better idea of reader numbers. Likes and comments are really only an indication of "likes and comments," they can't be used to determine readership, except in the very broadest of terms.

 

Should you wish to view the most popular novel, these are listed by page views, making the advance search listing highly inaccurate. However, when you look at the number one book, posted many years ago, and extrapolate from the number of followers, you are looking at a readership in the range of 1600 people. If I took my own story, using the same analysis, I'm looking at 50 people. These seem to be more accurate numbers than highly exaggerated page view numbers. My point being that the page views give a totally false impression of numbers of readers, I really can't see that they are useful as they stand, without some tweaking and tidying up. 

 

You could, for example calculate a time on page view, given the average reading time for one hundred words, excluding page clicks that don't stay on the page for the minimum time required to read the whole chapter. Such changes do involve work to put in place the calculations, and considering that you will bring more stats to authors in a year or so, this is perhaps not justified. It's simply that, to me, page views, provide no useful information and only mislead towards the conclusion that hundreds, or even thousands of people are reading books, when in all likelihood the numbers are very much smaller, tens and hundreds.

 

The comments and replies here have been very interesting, I appreciate your explanations of the system counts. It does all help, and go a long way to aid in seeing a better picture of actual readership. I'm attempting to say here, that even without changes, this discussion gives me good feedback on my readership, and that of other authors. So thank you.

 

[Timothy M.]

5 hours ago, Myr said:

@Timothy M.

 

I'll remind you once again that the vast majority of the people reading on the site are "guests" as in not member or not logged in and unable to like or comment in such a state.

 

I know, but I mostly ignore or forget about those when it comes to my own stories. Of course, I'm pleased for GA that the site has lots of traffic which can generate ads revenue.

[Ivor Slipper]

Based on the current situation with two new stories - one of which is Scene Change by Sam Wyer, it appears that the Page View counter isn't functioning at this time.

[Ivor Slipper]

3 hours ago, Ivor Slipper said:

Based on the current situation with two new stories - one of which is Scene Change by Sam Wyer, it appears that the Page View counter isn't functioning at this time.

 

It now appears to be working as there are totals showing on these stories.

[northie]

3 hours ago, Ivor Slipper said:

 

It now appears to be working as there are totals showing on these stories.

It's not on Parker's latest story A Spring Observation. An intermittent problem possibly?