Picture this: you sit down with your coffee (or Celsius!) and open your community’s dashboard. Whoa? That’s a big jump in page views! Before you add that new number to your executive reporting let’s dive in and understand what might be going on.
Recently, GrettaKraus started a discussion about noticing an uptick in non-human traffic on her site while the percentage of views classified a human declined. A bit of discussion followed that ended with this question: How do we demonstrate community value when pageviews alone aren’t telling the whole story? (H/T to Rav Singh and JasonHill for their ideas!)
Their conversation inspired this week’s tip: Give your traffic numbers context before drawing conclusion. That might seem obvious, but increasing AI usage makes this something worth revisiting.
Start with these four questions:
1. What traffic types are you counting?Higher Logic Vanilla’s Release 2026.009 introduced the Likely Automated traffic type. It identifies activity that appears automated but doesn’t match a known bot operator (it’s available alongside other traffic types in your Analytics settings).
Review your traffic filters and compare the overall trend with the human-user trend. This will help you understand whether the increase reflects more people visiting, more automated activity, or a combination.
2. Are your comparisons consistent?
Use the date comparable date ranges and filters when you look at changes overtime. You won’t get a useful comparison if you are comparing a whole month vs. just three weeks.
Extra tip – since the traffic classification change in June when the “Likely Automated” classification was introduced that will likely affect your numbers. If the time you are reporting on spans that change just add a note explaining it.
3. Where are the views going?
Aka which pages account for the increase? Are the increased page views spread across discussions or is it all on one page? Another h/t to Rav Singh here – in his reply he flagged that he saw unusually high sign-in page views when compared with active uses in the same period. This doesn’t tell him why it happened but is a good illustration for the value of digging into the data matters.
4. Can you pair traffic with evidence of increased member value?
As the community world (and general technology world) evolves to include AI we must think carefully about how we communicate our success. What worked last year won’t work now. Try pairing traffic data with concrete community goals:
- Questions that received a helpful answer
- Members starting or contributing to a discussion
- Examples of members helping other solve a problem.
This goes beyond the numbers and shows how the data tells a story that really impacts community value. What are members accomplishing when they visit? That’s a story people want to hear.
A challenge, if you chose to accept it! Open a traffic report, check the filters and date ranges and write one sentence about what the numbers show and one question that you want to investigate based on what you see.
Are you seeing the same non-human jump in pageviews? Join the original discussion or post the results from your challenge here!
