Hi! This is a first post. I appreciate the topic title is merging a few topics together. But in getting setup with Matomo and obtaining useful website data I am having a few problems. I have, of course, done some research before coming to the forum (i.e. consulted the documentation, searched the forum, and conducted internet search).
I am using Matomo On-premise as WordPress PlugIn, free version. I have disabled use of cookies in Settings > Tracking > Settings for Auto Tracking mode
Excluding traffic
So, the first obvious exclusion from my Matomo data is my own visits to my website. Easy right? Just exclude my own IP address in Settings > Exclusions > Global list of Excluded IPs! The problem is, as with many internet users using commercial IPs etc., I do not have a static IP address. So is there another way to exclude my visits to my own website?
Perhaps I need to exclude myself from the data in Settings > Exclusions > Global list of user agents to exclude? But what is the syntax required? The tip says “Regular expressions such as /bot|spider|crawl|scanner/i are supported” – is there any documentation for this?
Also, visiting Admin > Diagnostic > Device detection (or weblink: devicedetector.lw1.at) gives a string such as “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 OPR/119.0.0.0”
Presumably, if this string is pasted in the “Global list of user agents to exclude” text box then users with these devices will be excluded … maybe good for bots, but not specific enough to exclude just my own device.
Because I prefer not to track using cookies I cannot see a way to exclude tracing for users with device ID = XYZ. If cookies were enabled could I exclude specific unique device IDs?
I know it is possible to exclude visits by downloading a cookie on my browser but that does not seem very robust if I use a different browser or clear my cookies, etc.
Premium features
This raises the question of whether filtering of bots is only possible in premium plans i.e. by using the Tracking Spam Prevention feature
I tried filtering my report by entering a segment query in my dashboard to show Visitors > Visitor duration > Greater than > 1 … but I just got a time out so presumably this is only part of custom reporting which is a premium feature?
The reason for this segment query is that I wanted to exclude bots visits…real users typically visit for longer than 1 second!
Summary
As you can see from the above, I am struggling to get useable data from Matomo (excluding my own traffic and bots) and would appreciate a few pointers please either in terms of setup or reassurance that the premium version will have me covered.