Transitions Plugin and Visitor Log Purging

After having setup regular purging of our visitor logs (tracking tables), a client has notified us that the numbers they see in the Transitions Overlay are far smaller than those in the Pages report. The reason for this is explained here: Troubleshooting - Analytics Platform - Matomo


The main limitation of Transitions is that it only works on the period of time you still have the logs for. If you have set up Piwik to delete old logs, the pages report will still contain data from before because the reports were archived. Since Transitions reads its data directly from the logs it can only work if you still have the logs.

  1. It would have been very good if the documentation for setting up log purging (Troubleshooting - Analytics Platform - Matomo) would make clear that Transitions depends on log data, and that purging tracking tables will reduce the utility of Transitions. So I suggest that this be made clear in the documentation, because we have found that many clients like this Transitions Overlay feature and are disappointed that it is now not as useful since we delete visitor log data older than 3 months.

  2. Are there any plans to remove this dependency from Transitions and allow it get data from archived reports? Or is this not possible?

it’s not possible to get transitions from reports data.

Thanks for suggestion regarding doc. http://piwik.org/faq/troubleshooting/faq_42/

Transitions report: The Transitions report is processed in real time, using the logs. When deleting old log data, the report will display transitions only for the days that still have log data.

Great. And not to bother, but maybe a note should be added also about the fact that the Unique Visitors stat is limited to the period for which you’re keeping visitor logs. Thanks Matt.