Instead of tracking page loads, track how many times it was viewed (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Instead of tracking page loads, track how many times it was viewed (2017)

philipwalton.com

30 pointsokfine5 comments

"Imagine you install analytics on a traditional content site. A few months later you update that site to be a single page application (SPA) without changing your analytics code. Then, a few months after that, you update your site to be a progressive web app (PWA) "

Who on earth would ever do this? The worst boss of all time?

"Imagine you design a website, and then Google changes their ranking algorithm to provide preferential treatment to AMP pages. You see that your ranking has decreased, and so you implement AMP.

"A few months later, Google announces that they will provide preferential treatment to websites that have progressive web apps, and you see that your website falls in the rankings to the second page. Once again, when Google asks you to jump and dance like a moron, you flail your arms and repeat that you are not worthy."

When your entire business depends on how some 3rd party you don't have a business relationship with ranks/vets you you'd better believe you're in the ass-kissing industry. You act like Google's ass is somehow unique.

See:

- Restaurant reviews

- Fashion and cosmetics reviews

- Consumer reports

- Gaming 'journalism'

- NYT bestseller list

- Billboard top 40

- YouTube & Twitch Streaming

- App Store

Your options are to either find independent lead generation or pucker up.

At a large organization many business units will be tracking traffic metrics that flow through several layers of data warehousing and BI tools, far removed from any teams implementing changes to the site and logging.

This is an eye opening article for me.

You'll also want to track the pageshow and pagehide events (because of PageCache), and note that prerender is now obsolete. Browsers no longer support it and the spec is dead.

boomerang has been using PageVisibility for as long as the API has existed, and also handles the prerender case for when browsers did support it. The source is open if you'd like to see how we do it: https://github.com/soasta/boomerang

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