I’ve noticed in Matomo that sometimes a single user browsing my Web site will somehow have his visit split across dozens of unique visits Matomo. For example, he’ll visit /foo.html, which will have 30 impressions tracked via Content Tracking, and Matomo’s dashboard will place the page visit as its own visit on one line, and then all 30 impressions as 30 additional visits with just one line each. It’s as though this interaction that occurs treats every piece of data sent as a new visitor.
Here’s an example of that:
Note that the timestamps are identical, and it’s 100% one user browsing alone.
I’ve seen this happen when using Matomo events as well, where all the events that get triggered on a single page result in each of those triggered events taking up their own unique visitor section in Matomo’s UI:
In this example the user has changed the options for a product using a traditional browser element (<select><option>). This usually tracks the event as part of the page it occurs on, but I’ve seen the above happen, which doesn’t make sense.
I’ve seen this mentioned at least twice before but have never seen a resolution:
- Visitor actions not being linked into a single visit
- Multiple visits with same idvisitor within short period
The only observation I can make it that I’ve noticed it happen more regularly with users who visited the site from a campaign, or when there are hashtags in the URL, but for every case like this there are millions that do not behave this way. For reference we process about 2M requests a day in Matomo.
In fact, the only reason this was even noticed was because we were comparing campaign tracking in Matomo vs Google, and Matomo’s tracked data was significantly greater than in Google, which resulted in investigations for the periods, and that’s when it was noted that some of these pieces of data that should occur as part of one visit are being treated as unique visits.
Would anyone have insight on this?