I am a big fan of Piwik and have been using it for a couple of years now. Today I ran an ad campaign and was monitoring my server’s logs as well as using both Google Analytics and Piwik on the same page.
Piwik is not recording some visitors while they both appear in the log files and Analytics. These are NOT bots but real users some were coming thru search engines.
I think this is a major problem and should be looked at ASAP. I know others have complained about this but I finally have proof that this is happening.
Anyone else having this problem? One way to test it, is to add analytics to the same page and see what happens and then you can check your server logs for any discrepancy between Piwik and Analytics.
I have seen this thing happening for the first time last week… i define telly had visitors on site, doing live actions according to google analytic`s real-time dashboard, even placing orders… yet nothing in piwik, 0 visitors… double-checked to see if DO NOT TRACK was obeyed, it was not… i solved the issue by removing my manual-inserted tracking code in header.php and rely on piwik wordpress plugin… dont know what it did differently, but immediately started to show visitors upon refresh of the dashboard…hopefully it will keep working with version changes
In case it can help, we change our load balancer here and strangely, it didn’t accept URI longer than 255 chars. So we had internal traffic ok but people outside our private network just gave us the first hit because after the entry link, piwik.php would include Page name, referrer and so on information that exceeded 255 chars URI.
I doubt it’s your case but our way to discover this was to look at the Visitors=>Visitor Log and generate our own traffic.
Hi i find when one talks about how visitors are missing its due to them looking at web logs and comparing web logs to analytics pages results.
In this case you are comparing GA to piwik which is fine but what i find often is tagging is missing on some pages and in both cases to compare the 2 do it from each analytics program to each other and not just the web log.
1 To start to get an idea i recommend use a 24 hrs period where both codes have been active.
2 do a complete pages report 1 in GA then 1 in piwik. This will allow you to see what exact pages each analytics tools is using to contribute its numbers from.
3 compare the 2 lists and see if any pages is missing from one or the other as in theory if tagging is correct then you should at least show the same number of pages in each. You will likely find some pages missing that if looked at closer will help explain some of the gap between the 2 analytics tools you are using. I like the metric pageview personnally as visit can vary from each tool in how its calculated.