Matomo not reliably tracking Social Media Traffic to a WordPress Website

We are using the self hosted Matomo and we have the Referrers Manager Plugin installed. The software versions are as follows:

Matomo version: 3.8.1
MySQL version: 10.1.38-MariaDB
PHP version: 5.6.40

We are using our own WordPress plugin to track links via the Matomo API. However Matomo is not reliably tracking traffic coming from major social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.

I have also tried installing and configuring the Matomo WordPress plugin. Running the TestScript in the WordPress plugin produced the following successful result:

WP-Piwik 1.0.19 is successfully connected to Piwik 3.8.1. You are running WordPress 5.1.

Whilst we are seeing the odd social media traffic appearing but Matomo is not reliably tracking the traffic from social media to the WordPress website.

Any suggestions?

Do you know of a specific link on social media that does not get marked as a social referrer type in your Matomo, but does lead to visits? Does it have a an utm_source parameter perhaps?

Thank you for your response.

Below are a few example links from that resolves to one of our test WordPress websites but the referrer social sites and visits are not being displayed in Matomo under Acquisition/Social Networks. (No UTM source parameters are present).

These two are from Twitter:

And here is one from Tumblr:

https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.optionstradingsecrets.co%2Fessential-tips-for-competitive-article-marketing-strategies%2F&t=MWU2MzNlMDA3N2U1M2M4MGQ3NDg0ZTFjMTQyNjI3YTVjMTc5Y2UyZiwxODMyNzIyNzcwNzg%3D&b=t%3A83OhuXJ3oUnbTfDrn6ORNA&p=https%3A%2F%2Fbradlindsay.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F183272277078%2Fessential-tips-for-competitive-article-marketing&m=1

Occasionally we do see one or two Social Networks hits showing up in Matomo but it appears to be unreliable.

I’m not entirely sure about the tumbler link. In the Matomo server for my companies website (3.8.1) we also use Referrer Manager, and I noticed that tumblr only had tumblr.com listed as a possible hostname, not t.umblr.com

But I’ve never experienced a problem tracking vistors coming from twitter’s t.co hostname, but perhaps you could check that one too in your Referrers Manager?

I’m not familiar with WP-Piwik so I have no idea if that could be a culprit. Maybe you could try testing a page where the Piwik tracking code has been placed manually instead of by WP-Piwik and visit it a few times from different social media to see if Matomo still doesn’t identify them as soical?

Feel free to contribute this to the official list:

In the meantime I have now upgraded the server to PHP 7.2.15 and have increased the maximum memory available to PHP to 512M.

I have found that the tracking is actually working and can be seen in the ‘Visits Logs’. But whilst the ‘Visits Logs’ appears to be accurately displaying the traffic coming directly from the social sites, in most cases the traffic is shown as ‘Direct Entry’ rather than displaying the social site the traffic is actually coming from. The result is that the ‘Social Networks’ under ‘Acquisition’ display is still not accurately reflecting that traffic. (I’ve also manually added the t.umblr.com hostname to the Referrers Plugin).

If UTM Parameters are appended to the hyperlinks posted on the social media sites then the social sites are being recognised and displayed in the Matomo ‘Visits Logs’ but they are still not appearing in the ‘Social Networks’ Display.

So the main issue is that the ‘Social Networks’ display is not accurately showing the actual social media traffic (it only appears to show the odd results here and there).

Any suggestions as to why this might be so?

Anyone with any further ideas or suggestions?

Is your website running on SSL? Most websites these days are running over HTTPS. When someone is visiting another website over HTTPS and clicking on a link to your website, you want to make sure that the link to your website also references the HTTPS version of your website. (If a user on a HTTPS website clicks on a link to a HTTP page, the referrer will not be passed to the HTTP page). Therefore to make sure that all your referrers are correctly tracked in Matomo, you need to make sure that your website works on HTTPS and also that your links from other websites to your website use the HTTPS version of your website URLs.

Updated our FAQ at: Visits from search engines or campaigns are not recorded, Piwik shows "There is no data for this report" for all Referrers reports. FAQ - Analytics Platform - Matomo
Does this help maybe?

Thank you for your suggestions. The website is running SSL and the links to the website are over https. I wasn’t aware of the redirect issue, but I have run many tests using direct https hyperlinks to the website (with no redirects) and the tracking does not appear to be working reliably. We were especially expecting to be able to track and display direct link backs to blog posts from the major social media sites (such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest) but we have not been able to get this to work reliably. Thank you for the FAQ link. I think this has already been taken care of but I will pass it on to our developer.