Builder provides detailed analytics to highlight how your content is performing, including how many impressions your content is generating.
Separately, Builder measures Page views to track usage of the platform as part of your Builder subscription.
While there are some similarities between impressions and Page views, there are some key differences in Builder tracks and measures them.
Page views track usage of the platform as part of your Builder subscription. They tell you how many views you're getting on your site or app that contains content created in Builder. You can view page views in Account Settings under the Subscriptions tab.
Page views are recorded when a tiny (1x1) hidden image, called a tracking pixel, is rendered when someone is visiting your site or app. If a single page contains multiple content entries from Builder (such as two symbols), Builder ensures that these pixels are only counted once to avoid double-counting.
This is accomplished via a cache period in which the pixel request is cached in the user’s browser. In this way, multiple pixel requests on the same page from different Builder content entries only result in one tracking pixel request. Technically, this method can result in undercounting page views if a site visitor is navigating pages very quickly, but in most cases, this technique yields an accurate representation of page views.
An impression represents a view of a piece of content on your site. Builder tracks impressions for analytics and heat mapping capabilities as part of Growth and Enterprise plans.
Each Builder content entry is attached to JavaScript code that records when that content entry is loaded onto your page.
Builder's code collects anonymous information about the current visitor (most importantly to distinguish between users), packages it up with information about the content entry, and stores it to be used in your Insights dashboards. There's more on the Insights tab in Viewing metrics from the Insights tab.
An impression is a content entry-level event, while the page view is a page-level event.
Since you could have multiple content entries on one Page of your site, it’s possible that a single Page could fire multiple impressions, but it should only fire one Page view. For this reason, there could be a difference in the resulting number if you aggregated all of your impressions in Builder and compared them to Page views for a given period of time.
Because the tracking pixel is in an image tag, the only information recorded is that it was displayed. Impressions capture richer data for reporting purposes.
Bots generally look at HTML only, not images or scripts, so they don't affect Page views or impressions. Only full headless browser crawling will count images (and Page views) or cause JavaScript impression code to run.
Builder Page views are similar to Page views in Google Analytics. One visitor to one Page is one Page view. The same visitor visiting two Pages on your site with Builder content equals two Page views. Viewing or previewing your own content in the Builder app does not count as a Page view.
If you aggregate all of your content in Builder by page URL and compare page views for those URLs in Google Analytics, the counts will be close. However, there could be differences for the following reasons:
- Google Analytics' tracking via JavaScript and Builder’s Page view pixel are different mechanisms whose tracking will be invoked at different times.
- Depending on ad blockers or other browser extensions a user has, Google Analytics or Builder (or both) could fail to track a visit.
- Builder sets a long pixel cache time to make sure page views are not overcounted. Depending on the visitor behavior, this could lead to Builder undercounting total page views.
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