We’ve been using Matomo for years now but we’ve only done the investigation this year. We had our Matomo since 2017 and we went through the history of data and noticed a drastic drop in visitor count in March 2020. We were getting around 20,000-30,000 unique visitors daily before March 2020 and early March however later in March 2020, count started dropping until it reached around 6000 unique visitors. Up to this day, we only getting around 6000 visitors per day. In Cloudflare we’re consistently getting around 60,000 unique visitors per day so it does not make sense that Matomo is only getting 10% of what Cluodflare is recording. We even tried adding the “_paq.push([“disableCookies”]);” code but instead of helping, it made the visitor count worst. With the disable cookie code, we were only getting 50-100 unique visits per day so we had to revert to the old code.
Here’s the current code that we have.
var _paq = window._paq || [];
/* tracker methods like "setCustomDimension" should be called before "trackPageView" */
_paq.push(['trackPageView']);
_paq.push(['enableLinkTracking']);
(function() {
var u="https://www.mysite.com/piwik/";
_paq.push(['setTrackerUrl', u+'matomo.php']);
_paq.push(['setSiteId', '1']);
var d=document, g=d.createElement('script'), s=d.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
g.type='text/javascript'; g.async=true; g.defer=true; g.src=u+'matomo.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(g,s);
})();
Here are the visitor count in 2020 where we get around 20k visitors and started dropping. We have not updated our tracker and it is how it was since we installed it. There’s probably a change in Matomo that caused the drop.
As you can see, we we’re consistently getting 20k+ visits but it dropped and stayed at around 6k. This is impossible because Cloudflare analytics is getting around 60k unique visits per day and AWStats almost the same amount.
There must have been an update in 2020 that changed How Matomo is recording and I saw a very old post where they are also getting only 10% of what other Analytics are getting. We need Matomo to work as it has more information to other Analytics but the problem is that it’s gathering less visitor count compared to other Analytics.
