More Shares than Views

Just because someone re-shares a Facebook share doesn’t mean that they actually visited your site. Re-sharing something on Facebook, just like retweeting something on Twitter, can be done entirely without leaving Facebook or Twitter.

Also, keep in mind that the growing prevalence of tracker blockers (now built into Firefox and Safari), plays a role here. The share counters on Facebook and Twitter are strict counters (“How many times was that URL shared here?”) whereas view stats are still reliant on embedded trackers that are becoming increasingly blocked (this is true for Jetpack, Google Analytics, Matomo, and any embedded stats system).

8 shares on Facebook and 133 on jetpack button seems too radical for there to not be a problem?

The count on the Jetpack button is the total number of times the URL appears on Facebook. This includes individual shares, like me deciding to share the URL on my Facebook wall.

Forgive my confusion. Surely all url displays on Facebook must be matched by shares on Facebook? In this case, that is only 8.

Jetpack shows 133.

I’d probably be looking to an accounting based on the amounts you’ve paid Facebook and Jetpack to provide you with shares, hits, views, reactions, etc.

None of this is WordPress related except in the abstract. WordPress doesn’t do much with stats on its own.

If you are talking about a site on WordPress dot com you might touch base with them on what info, stats and traffic numbers they might provide.

Keep in mind anyone offering stats may have an agenda that benefits in skewing numbers to make their results look better, more productive, or more enticing to depend on.

the truth lies somewhere in or outside of most of that.

Where exactly are you seeing the 8 and where exactly are you seeing the 133? I need a bit more context.

It’s a www.remarpro.com site. It’s not abstract. I’m trying to understand what Jetpack is telling me. Please return to the beginning and tell me why this makes sense:

Facebook – 1587 reach with 441 reactions
Facebook – 8 shares
Jetpack – 37 views.
Jetpack shares counter 133

Surely my confusion is understandable?

My last post was to @jnashhawkins but hopefully that answers @macmanx too.

Are these numbers about 1 specific post? Which post?

As I said, “WordPress doesn’t do much with stats on its own.”.

The website link was provided above. I’m querying that post only but its indicative of a problem I’ve experienced before.

https://themikehampton.com/south-africa-legalise-prostitution
vs
https://www.facebook.com/themikehampton/posts/2088966061186626?__xts__%5B0%5D=68.ARBqd2eWtcFqlcQQXJVVYYCj6jDQASaLxFGUrA9JTRMDV0OLBBdejAIgYv4MGO4L84iOl7fsOe3rQNdzif7AYhXdQirtawWzcqt4FgnkYLErow0gHr0o3C7ina4YVXBnOb1lgBJeWp5Qhw7ZKPpvjpm627Jgd0sMHPBoVKoJWNb85tGp63lXtv-lwQVKXKIKR8Gs5rPgJEbOhLhj-zNxVZ7q8ioOerzHosbTNSByKrIDkIsS5M2c26RWAwzcOkWGgAvypYZ-pwUSnxezz34I_2EPFDMFrM3YMlBp--wYU5O1fkikFV6o_nlBtLib9UhjpxYWVkvo8GdV6I4DvmfaSt4aqulZ&__tn__=-R

Unfortunately, I’ll be offline. Will check back tomorrow. Thank you.

Per https://www.sharedcount.com/ it would appear that the number in Jetpack’s share button is correct.

I’m not sure why Facebook itself reports such a drastically lower number, there could be some other discrepancy involved, so I recommend checking with their support on that.

One possibility of discrepancy, Facebook’s share count API is very old-school and only matches _exact_ URLs. For example, as far as it’s concerned, https://themikehampton.com/south-africa-legalise-prostitution/ and https://themikehampton.com/south-africa-legalise-prostitution are two totally different things. Notice the missing slash at the end? Fun times.

If you put https://themikehampton.com/south-africa-legalise-prostitution/ into https://www.sharedcount.com/ you’ll see that they report 142 shares. This is a tiny bit higher than the 133 reported by Jetpack’s sharing button, but that could just be caching.

Either way, it’s far higher than 8, and I recommend checking with Facebook’s support on that.