Possible causes of some visits not being registered?

Support & Bugs
1

Dear all,
I am facing a somewhat confounding issue on my website, on which I have Piwik configured in an “analytics” subdomain.

I have noted that some visits do not show up in the “Visitors in Real-time” widget and since today, I can be very sure of that. See, the thing is that my website is managed using the SilverStripe CMS, which I have heavily extended and customized. Yesterday for instance, I made it so that two pages that I have created via the CMS would automatically trigger an e-mail to the admin (i.e. me) whenever the PHP page was processed to be displayed to a user. The only information I have there is that the page has been visited and the date and time that the visit occurred.

I have sent an e-mail to a prospective client yesterday, an the e-mail contains a linked to a page that is present on the website but never linked to: it is a direct access link, meaning that the page cannot be accessed by simply browsing the website.

I have received two e-mails today, one this morning and another one minutes ago, meaning that the page has been visited. I know the times of the visits and that’s all. In the Piwik dashboard though, I have no entries at all. The same happens when visitors register new accounts and download software: sometimes, I know something has happened only when new registration e-mails land in my inbox.

My Piwik instance is configured as follows:
[ul]
[li] The Piwik script code is in the source code of the pages
[/li][li] There are no IP exclusions
[/li][li] The “analytics” domain is accessed via HTTPS only (redirection in .htaccess)
[/li][li] In the Settings section of the Administration, “Trusted Piwik Hostname” was to the khalemy.com and I have added www.khalemy.com after the first e-mail, to no avail.
[/li][li] In the Privacy section of the Settings, I have temporarily disabled Do Not Track also after receiving the first e-mail this morning, also to no avail.
[/li][li] System Check in the Diagnostic section shows a problem with LOAD DATA INFILE in “Database abilities”, but I’m running a CentOS 6.7 server and the most up to date MySQL version is… 5.1.73! Yes, ridiculously backward minor version but this is CentOS. I don’t believe this could be a problem: I rarely get 5 visits a day.
[/li][/ul]

Upgrade to the latest version was yesterday.

I have just tested the website by browsing it myself with Chromium (no ignore cookie is set in this browser) and my own visits don’t show up.

What could be the reason? And also, what is the meaning of “Trusted Piwik Hostname”? What should I put in there?

Thanks for any insight into this.

2

I’ve been investigating this and here is attached what I can read in Chromium’s developer console. The weird thing is that when I click the link to piwik.js, the contents of the file in Sources is nowhere to be seen (i.e. the file is empty). However, when I enter the link directly in the address bar, the browser does show the contents of the file.

I’ve deleted the ignore cookie from Firefox and Opera, and the visits are correctly registered. I’m starting to suspect that some privacy options in the browser (Chromium, and possibly Google Chrome) filter out analytics software. The visits that are not registered might then be all tied to Chromium-derived browsers.

In my Chromium instance that exhibits this problem (of not loading piwik.js), the privacy setting that sends a “Do not track” request to the server isn’t ticked.

All in all, I can’t understand what is happening.

3

OK, I wrote earlier in this very post about a scenario but it was a mistake on our part and I’ve now understood the reasons for some links not showing up.

Does Piwik have log files that I can enable?

4

Hello

It’s likely this issue, if it’s experienced by people using Chrome, is this bug: Chrome’s “Data Saver” mode prevents tracking of many visitors using Chrome browser · Issue #7733 · matomo-org/piwik · GitHub

It is fixed in git, and is available in 2.15.0 beta: faq beta I would like to test early beta and RC releases, how do I enable automatic updates to use these development versions? - Analytics Platform - Matomo

please report if you still experience some issue

5

Thanks for that update, Matt. I have also found an additional explanation, reading that github link to the Chrome data saver problem: since yesterday or the day before, I have understood that some of the page visits which triggered notification e-mails to me and that did not show up in Piwik were caused by spiders and bots. For instance, GeoIP identified one of those IP addresses as belonging to hostname that had “spider” in it :slight_smile: Another address resolved to a Yandex bot…

With info from the issue linked to above, I also suspect that some other visitors are search bots that are filtered out in VisitExcluded.php

I’ll keep an eye out for this.