Log_visit log queries

Hi,

We are in the process of evaluating PIWIK and we really like the product so far. Our primary (quite a common one) requirement is to identify returning vs non-returning visitors and identify the ones which convert and those who don’t. We have done some local testing from the same browser, and after having a look at the log_visit log we had some observations that we wanted to clarify on how PIWIK is tracking.

  1. As shown in the picture, the configid is the same since we are using the same ip and browser profile - This is correct, however we were expecting that since the configid is the same, we would have the first visit with visitor_returning=0 and the others set to visitor_returning=1. After reading this documentation we though that this would be the expected behaviour on when trust_visitors_cookies is set to 1, but we haven’t set that.

  2. Also, according to this documentation, if a userId is set, this userid will be converted into a hex visitiorid - what we noted is that even though the user_id is not set since this was just a normal visit, PIWIK still populated the log_visit.idvisitor column. What is this representing? and why does it change across visits?