Missing page hits when coming from search

Support & Bugs
1

Hello Matomo friends,

We have a long-time self-hosted Matomo instance behind a firewall to track our WordPress intranets. Our search engine is behind the firewall as well. We’ve noticed a steep decline in page hits since upgrading to Matomo on PHP7 (now on 3.11.0) from Piwik on PHP5 earlier this year.

Current experiments are showing that when an uninoculated user clicks on a search result, there is no page hit logged for the landing page in controlled tests. We are using a common footer across our WordPress sites that includes the tracking code, and we can see page hits on direct entry to WordPress URLs when we test in uninoculated browsers. However, if the click is referred from the search engine, we see no page hit even when we test well outside the 30 minute referrer window.

How do we troubleshoot this problem?

Thanks,

Amy

2

Hello,

apawell’s coworker here.

As a sanity check, I started tracking our websites on another instance of Matomo (Piwik, acutally) to see if that other instance is picking up the visits and referrers.

So, I put the tracking code from our Piwik 2.16.1 instance into our footer, and sure enough, that instance was accurately tracking the visits and picking up every visit referred by our search appliance. We have now have 1 to 1 comparison going on and the newer version of Matomo isn’t even close compared to the older Piwik version, especially when it comes to tracking visits from the search page.

Is there any change since that version of Piwik that may cause this issue?

Thanks,
Andy