Vanity participants significantly higher than actual visits

[Aaron Jensen]

Google analytics reports around 300 visits yesterday but vanity
alleges over 1000 participants. I can understand that people count as
two participants if they login after viewing a page with a test, but
it seems much further off than that. Any ideas what would be causing
such a large discrepancy?

[Ryan Cush]

I'm seeing the exact same behavior. Vanity is showing around 4x what Google Analytics shows. This didn't occur with my first Vanity experiment a few weeks ago, but I deployed 3 more last night and the numbers are way off. I can't figure out what's going on.  All of my experiments use the same Metric, but I wouldn't think that would cause the participants to over-report.  Did you ever solve this?

[Doug Cole]

By default vanity tracks all page requests, whereas google analytics only works for browsers with javascript enabled. The difference you are seeing is likely from robots hitting your page (googlebot, bingbot, etc). Vanity can also be setup to track only browsers with javascript enabled as well: https://github.com/assaf/vanity#registering-participants-with-javascript

Doug

Doug

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[Ryan Cush]

Thanks, Doug. (And thank you for creating this fix in the first place). Now I have a dumb question regarding the 2nd step:

Set Vanity.playground.add_participant_path = ‘/path/to/vanity/action’, this should point to the add_participant path that is added with Vanity::Rails::Dashboard, make sure that this action is available to all users

How do I know what to use here? I just have a standard vanity installation, I never mucked with Vanity::Rails::Dashboard or anything…is there a default value that should be used? This sounds like something that perhaps could be handled by default w/o adding this line, yet override-able if needed.

Thanks,

Ryan

[Doug Cole]

Hey Ryan,

 You can just create a controller and then mixin the vanity dashboard. Here's roughly what I use, note that admin_user_only isn't part of vanity, but it's probably a good idea to have your vanity dashboard password protected:

class VanityController < ApplicationController

  include Vanity::Rails::Dashboard

  include Vanity::Rails::TrackingImage

  before_filter :admin_user_only, :except => [:add_participant, :image]

  protect_from_forgery :except => :add_participant

end

Doug