[simontabor]

We get a lot of questions at GoSquared (https://gosquared.com) as to why their engagement metrics (and visitor counts) are so different between GA and GoSquared.

Pinging all visitors to check their still online is our solution, rather than making a guess/estimate - this means that sometimes GA reports about 10 visitors online when there are actually more like 100.

This is especially true with HN posts where most people only visit the one page and then leave.

Thanks for the great post :)

[oneeyedpigeon]

Does that mean GoSquared will report a page that has been open for days, taking up a tab but not being actively looked at, as 'online', or is there a timeout after a specific period of inactivity?

[dangrossman]

I don't know about GoSquared, but I built a similar real-time dashboard for W3Counter [1] that operates the same way. It would include that visitor as long as the tab is still open, but it also shows how many visitors are idle versus writing or reading (recently scrolled or moved the mouse, which requires the tab be in the foreground), so you know how many are just sitting in tabs.

1: http://www.w3counter.com/features/pro

[simontabor]

We monitor if the page is focused or blurred, so you can get both metrics in real-time.