PIWIK creating new visits when it shouldn't

Hi

I’m seeing strange behaviour from our PIWIK platform. I am seeing TWO visits being created, instead of one, for a visitor who took the following actions:

---- Visited site.com/page1?utm_source=test. In DB, no referrer URL shows, but campaign source logged correctly. Created as “Visit 1”
---- Exactly 79 seconds later, clicked from that page through to site.com/page2. A New visit was started “Visit 2”. Same visitorId. In DB, this 2nd Visit shows as having referrer URL as “site.com/page1?utm_source=test”. The visit also shows in DB with "referer_keyword=“site.com”, campaign_name=“test”, campaign_keyword=“site.com”.
----- User filled in a form and next Action was 100 seconds later, which was load of site.com/goal1 which is a goal completion page. This Action stayed within Visit 2.

I cannot see why this would have created TWO Visit records. Also why the second visit record would have its own domainname as the referrer url. Also, why the second visit shows a campaign name - only campaign tracking item at all in scope there is “utm_source”, but that was in the url of the PREVIOUS url, not first Action of the 2nd visit.

NOTE: I have already set the following config to prevent new visits being set whenever a new campaign referrer is used:
create_new_visit_when_campaign_changes=0
Also - I do NOT set Piwik UserId setting in my app anymore, after I realised that this caused a new visit to be created and new visitorId to be generated.
I have checked and the IP address did not change between the two visits.
Finally,we have also got the following setting in place: trust_visitors_cookies = 1

Any ideas very gratefully received!

Thanks

Gareth

Hi Gareth

it’s possible that you have hit this bug: Multiple visits with each pageview when “/?pk_campaign” is used · Issue #9299 · matomo-org/piwik · GitHub

which was fixed in our latest RC, please test if your new visitor data also shows such “bug”: I would like to test early beta and RC releases, how do I enable automatic updates to use these development versions? - Analytics Platform - Matomo

Hi matthieu

Unfortunately I am not able to install the RC version as this is a mission critical installation used across about 100 key client sites for us. Might be worth adding - we do not archive off any Visit/Action data at all. We are compiling key user history data here. We are eventually looking at shipping out to a data warehouse approach, but that may be some time off yet.

Do you have any approx idea when this bug fix from the RC may be going into a Production release version?

Also - in terms of testing if my visitor data shows this bug - from looking through the bug info you linked to, I’m afraid I can’t very easily see what I would be testing for. Sorry. Do you have any more info?

Many thanks!

Gareth

This issue has been resolved… Our config changes for “create_new_visit_when_campaign_changes=0” hadn’t been entered correctly.
Thanks