More Unique Visitors than Pageviews

[ewc21]

I looked at one month of my log stats and found that the number of unique visitors exceed the number of pageviews. I understand that the number of pageviews should at least be equal to the number of unique visitors.

Currently the stats tell me there are 0.8 pageviews per unique visitors. How could this happen?

Any ideas guys?

[ewc21]

Still no word guys?

[dannysullivan]

Haven't looked at this issue for a long time, but one thing might be that you've got remote downloads. Someone is requesting a file but not loading it. That triggers a page request, but if page view are tracked by say javascript being loaded, then that wouldn't happen.

[B-Double-U]

This is really a question for your analytics provider, because they all handle the logs differently. Or if it is an implemented package with tagging, it may just be the tagging methodology.

I have seen where an error page would cound a unique visitor, but not a page view. I have also seen where a user has a security setting that makes stats believe that it is a new browser session on every page load, but the machine name is still the same. So it may not reflect the proper number of pages viewed.

You could also be counting spiders and crawlers as visitors...

Hope that helps. There are just so many different scenarios that it makes it difficult to give a concrete answer.

[farees]

Hi ewc21,
More unique visitors than page views does sound a little crazy, but could happen. How many pages do you have in your site? And is your site running on a d/b - dynamic.

It could be that you are using a meta tag for page refresh far too quickly, resulting in the page getting re-loaded again and again.

If nothing else I would personally try out a different analytics tool and study the stats for at least a month.

- Farees