Currently I’m evaluating different Web Analytics Solutions for an online portal. Every user has to login and must allow cookies.
The question is:
Will Piwik create it’s own session ids to identify a visit?
Or will Piwik use the user-agent / IP-adress combination to identify a visit?
…or can Piwik use exisiting session IDs which were created by the portal?
It would also be interesting to know if other Web Analytics systems handle this differently
@matthieu Could you please clarify how we can override piwik’s internal logic to determine a visit.
As far as I know, the only way to specify is to store the following information:
_idvc - Current visit count.
_viewts - Previous visit time stamp
_idts - First visit timestamp.
I do not want to keep track of all of this info and send it over for each event and what I want to do instead is to
create a session id manually using the timestamp and mac address and override piwik’s logic for calculating a visit.
Do let me know and I am looking forward to your reply as this is causing me some trouble to get the correct visit count.
@peterbo Thanks for the reply. But how can ‘UserId’ help me differentiate between visits? What I want is something like a ‘VisitId’ which is more or less like a session id.
when the user ends his visit / logs out. To completely override Matomo’s visit logic, you’ll have to set the visit_standard_length (config) to a very high value (and start / end the UserID visits on your own then).
I don’t know if this will create reasonable statistics, but it possibly will fit your needs.