Creating comparison between tracking methode

[MrSnuts (Richard)]

JS-Tracking, php-Tracking, LogFile import or image tracking - which method should I choose and why

Disclaimer: this is a draft needing revision, no guarantees on correctness at this stage! This article shall eventually cover the differences between the available ways of collecting visitor data with Matomo, to serve as an entry point to integrating Matomo in the way that matches your demands. It is generally possible to use a mix of methods, but before you start implementing Matomo, you might want to get familiar with eachs methods benefits and limitations. Let’s start by taking a look at …

@Lukas Tried that above, not sure the outcome really is easy to read (I’m missing ways to define borders & backgrounds), neither is that very convenient to edit… but maybe that will do for now. Did you spot any wrong info so far?
p.s.:
is not resolved correctly in the live preview, but looks better than in the finished table…

[Lukas (Lukas Winkler)]

@MrSnuts

is not resolved correctly in the live preview

That’s just the discourse cache and should be resolved after some time. (I just added those two as custom emojis)

In my opinion this is quite readable as it is now.

[MrSnuts (Richard)]

To point out a few things where I wasn’t 100% sure:
Is it correct that the bot detection performed by the device detector is applied BEFORE the raw data gets stored into the DB, or is that applied when generating the reports?

Which tracking method is recommended for in-app tracking? That might be a useful thing to state, too.
Feel free to add & edit, I just collected what is know and has been relevant to me.

Are there advanced Matomo features which are bound to a certain method? Like heatmaps, for one thing - if that is tied to JS-tracking, it might be worth pointing towards that.

Off-topic / side-thought:
At some point, I started to wonder if it would be interesting to look at the number of bot hits as detected by the DeviceDetector in the reporting “Visitors” segment.
I think this might be interesting, too, if detected bots were kept as a separate kind of visitor - it would help to detect increased crawler activity while still keeping bot hits out of the way when looking at visitor behaviour.

[Lukas (Lukas Winkler)]

@MrSnuts

Is it correct that the bot detection performed by the device detector is applied BEFORE the raw data gets stored into the DB, or is that applied when generating the reports?

I’m pretty sure. The user agent doesn’t get saved.

@MrSnuts

Which tracking method is recommended for in-app tracking?

If it’s mostly a webview, one could try tracking it like an website. Otherwise one would use the SDK in the used language (https://developer.matomo.org/guides/tracking-api-clients) similar to the PHP tracker.

@MrSnuts

At some point, I started to wonder if it would be interesting to look at the number of bot hits as detected by the DeviceDetector in the reporting “Visitors” segment.

I also had the same idea recently. There is a plugin which creates a bot report, but it doesn’t use DeviceDetector but rather a small hardcoded bot list (at least I think so).

Bot Tracker

A extensive bot report would be really nice. Maybe @SteveG is interested.

[MrSnuts (Richard)]

Just to make sure we won’t end up in editing eachs others contributions -
I switched the “works in static html pages” checker for the php tracking to ,
not sure if you edited that or wether I made a mistake earlier.