Site search with query string parameter "?q=" doesn't track page views

Support & Bugs
1

Hello everyone.

We’re having an issue with page tracking on a site.

This site is a search site just like Google.
On this site we have three pages, each page is dedicated to one category such as: “web results”, “documents” and “organizations”.
We would like to know how many visitors each page has. The problem is that piwik doesn’t seem to track page views under “Actions/Pages” if the parameter “q” exists in the query string.

Lets say someone searches for “pizza pie”:
?q=pizza+pie

This will log a site search but not a page view.

If we exclude the query paramter:
?q=

It will log a page view.
Is it possible to get both?

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi there,
Well the easiest here would be to have the website. Could you please just indicate us the URL. I guess it is either a # issue or the fact that the pages do not have the tracking code.
That should be quite easy to do.

3

Yes of course, the site is Sök - Webb
The page view tracking works as normal so long as the q parameter is missing. :slight_smile:

4

Yes that’s weired, probably @Findus23 will have an idea. I have the feeling too that there is something wrong but I cannot know what yet.

5

Hi,

It took me a while to understand how you have embedded the tracking script. Unfortunatly I can’t find a difference between the search site you liked and the home page. The tracking request is sent to piwik and returns success (200)

http://piwik.vgregion.se/piwik.php?action_name=S%C3%B6k%20-%20Webb&idsite=122&rec=1&r=868826&h=17&m=44&s=24&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhitta.vgregion.se%2Fwebb%2F%3Fq%3Dsallad%2B%C3%A4r%2Bnyttigare%26d%3D%26c%3D&_id=8011500fe8238ca4&_idts=1503934977&_idvc=1&_idn=0&_refts=0&_viewts=1503934977&send_image=1&pdf=1&qt=0&realp=0&wma=0&dir=0&fla=0&java=0&gears=0&ag=0&cookie=1&res=1920x1080&gt_ms=278&pv_id=k42uFp

You can try out enabling the debug mode for the tracker and see if an error occurs, but otherwise I am out of ideas.
https://developer.piwik.org/api-reference/tracking-api#debugging-the-tracker

6

I didn’t realize that the home page logged both page views and search queries…
When we enabled debug mode the request to piwik time out (we have quite a few sites using piwik). So we couldn’t get any more info from that, but it was a good idea to try.

I’ve also tired to strip the page of all html content, still no success.
What I’m thinking as a workaround is to log page views twice for our search pages.

    _paq.push(['trackPageView']);

    _paq.push(['setCustomUrl', location.protocol + '//' + location.host + location.pathname]); // This will return the URL without any parameters
    _paq.push(['trackPageView']);

That will be good enough. Thanks for your help!