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We’ve had no problems up until a few months ago when we seemed to get some glitches with certain post’s stats. Sometimes a bit more and sometimes double the actual number in Google Analytics.
This month we noticed they were way off at the end of the month, with nearly all the stats wrong and way over. We tried to run a fresh import, the way we usually fix flaky figures, but it keeps returning thousands more views per story than the Google Analytics figures.
We do have quite a busy site and often have hundreds of thousands of rows to import. We also run on a 3 server setup with a load balancer but all our admin traffic is to one source server. Anyway, this month we are having to do all our staff payments manually…which is quite complicated as they are paid per view, for 30 days from publication per post. You can imagine doing that for 600 posts is a pain.
We have tried limiting row per refresh down to 100 but we don’t think that is the problem as the server can process 2000 at a time without hanging.
One thing we do notice is that the row in the queue will often keep rising for quite a bit of time after import…is that may be causing some to be processed twice?
WE really need to sort this as we’ve possibly paid out thousands more than we should have and now our writers are starting to doubt the accuracy of the software, obviously trust is very important for us.
If you could have a look that would be handy!
Thanks
JamesHi James,
my advice is to enable Analytics debug mode and re-import data manually. When all pending rows have been dealt with (you can use whatever number of rows per page load your server can handle without timeout, so if 2000 is good, go for it), share with me the filepost-pay-counter-pro/temp/ppcp_ga.logalongside with a couple examples of posts which have wrong figures in the PPC dashboard.I can provide any further help, if needed 🙂
A nice day,
StefanoIn Stats if I go into say user Tiffany Bailey and look at some posts that are below 20,000 views, since we cap payments at that.
Example 1
Denise ‘Niecy’ Foster remembered on Families of the Mafia
https://www.monstersandcritics.com/tv/reality-tv/denise-niecy-foster-remembered-on-families-of-the-mafia/Post Counter is saying she is owed for 17538 views. Now we only pay for 30 days after publication, which in this case would be until the end of May.
In Google Analytics the combined for this URL is 7,663, even if some error in the time to be counted up until today it has only totalled 8746 uniques.
Example 2
7 Little Johnstons exclusive: Trent deals with bullies when they attack his family
https://www.monstersandcritics.com/tv/reality-tv/outdaughtered-premiere-date-when-do-the-busbys-return-to-tlc/Postcounter: 14054
Google Analytics:7001 and even with limit not working 7026There are dozens like this.
Here is a link to the ppcp_ga.log note it is over 500mb.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jyg6y40f4n20joi/ppcp_ga.log?dl=0I can give admin access to the site if you drop me an email, if that helps.
Thanks
JamesHi Stefano, yes we are.
Uhm, there is something odd where it looks like the same rows are processed twice. Are there any errors in the Error log box in the Options page?
Hi, thanks for having a look. No there are no errors. In the past, I’ve seen maybe a dozen in a run but just things like cannot match a URL that has been appended, etc. So nothing I think would relate to this.
Stefano,
Version 1.8.7.2
How busy is the admin area? It looks like there might be concurrent requests to wp-admin that end up processing the same analytics temp files (although we have mechanism to prevent that). Or, in alternative, that the temporary files are not deleted after being processed. Since this happened recently, did anything change in your setup? Some new aggressive caching? Some file managing new thing? Can you think of anything that could interfere? 🙂
A nice day,
StefanoThe admin area is quite busy sometimes during the day, but nothing crazy. You might have a max of say ten writers online at once. I guess some of them will have multiple pages open etc.
We don’t cache the site apart from aggregating and deferring javascript and with Cloudflare, though wp-admin is excluded from any cache.
We think it started a good few months ago but has gotten more of an issue. Though we’d have to audit all our payments to really tell.
What I would say is that we are on a mutli server setup. So we have a source webserver, a duplicate server, and a database server. A load balancer distributes requests to the two webservers. However, all requests to wp-admin are supposed to only go to the source server. Otherwise, stuff would be overwritten during the sync, so I don’t think that is the problem.
What I would say is that we are on a mutli server setup
Aha, this would explain it! I believe the same Analytics-to-be-processed file gets duplicated and thus processed twice. Is it possible that this could happen? 🙂
A nice day,
StefanoIt is my understanding that traffic coming into the loadbalancer gets distributed to web1 and web2 more or less evenly. But anything coming to wp-admin only goes to web1. This avoid this sort of problem and is working as we don’t see staff writing a post on web2 by accident and then it getting deleted when web1 overwrites it during sync.
I’ll ask our hosting company if it is possibly an issue.
Where are those temp files stored?
Temp files go into
post-pay-counter-pro/temp/ga. You can actually see them when an Analytics update runs, that one time per day that it happens 🙂OK, we finally managed to fix this. We had to filter requests from the plugin outside of wp-admin, tp wp-content, on our load balancer and also stop the duplication of the temp files on our second web server. We could not identify the specific part of the script calling to them but stopping them being created fixed it.
That and reinstallation and dropping all the tables seems to have fixed it.
So really only a problem for people with a cluster setup.
However, we now have another issue which is unrelated. I’ll start a separate thread for that.
Cheers
James
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