Could a scanned QR code distort/ break statistics?

We are currently at a live event where we have some QR codes around and all of them go to the same page. I didn’t set up anything special in matomo.
Strangely enough every user that is tracked by matomo (looking at page views of the QR code destination and live users) is on the page for 0 seconds and leaves the page without doing anything on our site.

For sure this could be a thing. But 0 seconds for everybody and no click somewhere else seems pretty weird. Tracking on the rest of the page is working. So I can see when a user switches to another site. All of this is documented. Only the “QR code destination” page looks bugged.

Could this happen due to any preload of the smartphone when scanning the QR code?
That the smartphones loads the page in the background before the user clicks the link to open it?

Anything else that could explain this behaviour?

Unfortunately I can’t test it myself right now because the even is right now and I don’t want to distort the tracking (the part of it that is working).

I hope it’s clear what I’m talking about. If you need some more information, please let me know.

We use matomo 4.8.0

Was correct the url you put in the QR code? To me looks like an instant redirect.
Maybe a javascript inside the page?

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Hi,

It looks like the QRCode has a redirect URL, this is the reason why the first page has 0 second session time.

Ronan

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Another answer from Matomo team:

Half of the answer is the 0 seconds part. Under the hood, if you don’t add a heartbeat with JS, you can’t tell the seconds on page until they click the next page. So 0 seconds makes sense for maybe half of the visitors.

That doesn’t help your main question: why are there zero multi-page visits…

Troubleshooting this could start in DevTools of a browser:

  1. With dev tools open, visit the QR code
  2. Check in the console for JS errors.
  3. Click in the devtools network tab, hit reload, look for network errors

Footnote: How to add a heartbeat timer with javascript, to mostly eliminate any “0 Seconds” visits: https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/faq_21824/