I installed Piwik two weeks ago as an alternative to GA. I have been testing it on two sites with medium traffic. So far, I am very impressed.
I am having two issues though - I’ve been searching through the forums hoping to find an answer, but admit I might not be technical enough to know exactly what I should be searching for.
Issue 1 - Unique visitor count:
Usually a few times a day, someone hits one of my sites and reads through a few pages. However, each visit is being tracked as a unique, even though they are indeed one person. This really throws off my stats, because it’s not uncommon to have visitors read 30 pages or more in a single visit. When 100 pageviews are tracked as 100 unique visitors and not 3 or 4… well, I’m sure I don’t have explain what that looks like.
I have read up on setting trust_visitor_cookies, but from what sense I can make of it, it seems to be reserved for visitors coming from the same IP. Would it also work in this case also?
Issue 2 - Visits left untracked
This does not solely happen when I have trust visitor cookies set. Close to 5% of my visits - no matter how they arrive at my sites but usually via search, are not tracked at all. In some instances, the first page will be recorded, but any following visits are not. I can verify that at least some of these are real human visits, as some of them have corresponded directly to me via comments, email or even phone.
These are all internal pages and all pages have the javascript on them. They are all internal pages with no redirects or downloads. Outlinks seem to be accurately tracked regardless, if that makes any difference.
Is this a case of some sort of timeout waiting for a response?