Removing bots from visitor logs

Hi, I am new to Piwik. Is there some way to remove bots from visitor logs? Can I, for instance, remove all visits under 3 seconds long?

By default Piwik ignores the bots. which bots are tracked in your piwik? see Does Piwik track visitors without Javascript? Does Piwik track search engine bots or other spider / robots? - Analytics Platform - Matomo

Hi Matt and thanks for responding. I am not sure as I am not technical, but I see a lot of ‘visits’ that are just 2 seconds long, which suggests that these are not real visitors.

can you check that you’re using latest piwik version?

I definitely am using the latest version. I only loaded it a week or so ago.

Matt? You there? :0)

btw what makes you think they are bot? can you post screenshot showing the bots?

I am not sure how I identify bots. I just assumed that anything that lasts one or two seconds is a bot…

To be honest, piwik is not perfect when it comes to measuring time spent on website

I know because i tested it many times, and in 90% cases it says that user spent 2 seconds on website, when actually user spent 20 seconds or more…

That’s useful to know. Many thanks.

please comment in this feature request: Support Ping requests to report a better 'time on page' · Issue #2041 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub

Thanks again.

Good news! Starting in Piwik 2.14.0 the new feature of tracking how long users stay on page (using a Heart beat timer “ping” request) has been released. You can enable it with


_paq.push(['enableHeartBeatTimer']);

By default, a ping request will be sent every 15 seconds. You can specify a custom ping delay (in seconds) by passing an argument, eg,


_paq.push(['enableHeartBeatTimer', 10]);

Learn more in the Tracking JavaScript guide: JavaScript Tracking Client: API Reference - Matomo Analytics (formerly Piwik Analytics) - Developer Docs - v3

Update today to enjoy this new feature (as well as many other improvements!)