Troubleshooting installations

Wondering if there’s a detail troubleshooting proceedure for when Piwik doesn’t track visitors? The troubleshooter/faq only says to check your install, but nothing else if that’s not it, and it seems there’s a lot of people having troubles that aren’t due to a problem installing the tracking code?

I’ve got Piwik installed on one server (shared, unix/apache) and I’ve added several websites … some on the same server, others on a different server … some on each server are tracking, some on each server aren’t. Some are blogs, some aren’t… no apprent pattern to it.

Those websites that are tracking, are only showing about 10% of the visits/pageviews that my logs are showing. I’ve seen several posts on this in the forum and there seems to be a lot of situations where Piwik simply doesn’t track users.

I’ve done a direct copy-and-paste of the tracking code for each into the correct position on the page, so I can’t see it being an installation problem, but I’ve got no idea where to start looking for a solution?

So at the risk of repeating a question already asked … can anyone point me to a checklist or troubleshooter of some sort to try an pin this down?

And can anyone reassure me it’s going to be worth the effort?

I do like the look of Piwik, and I’d really like to use it for all my sites, but I’m reluctant to spend too long trying to get it to work, if it’s only going to track a small percentage of my visitors? Does it actually work accurately once it’s installed an operational?

Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions!

See this guide: Troubleshooting - Analytics Platform - Matomo

There was a part where you asked for reasurance… I thought i would point out a few as I have extensive experience with both GA and omniture… let me know what you think…

Omniture extremely expensive for most typical users. Piwik free just host or data use costs if applicable.

GA free, but samples data after certain thresholds are met. (Guess what they have a premium version and yes costs some nice coin) This threshold when one gets to high usage sites can suddenly drop down to very small levels, imagine doing an analysis from 10% of your actual data!) Piwik 100% that which you code track.

GA and Omniture both collect and host data locally so you dont really own it.(piwik its all yours)

GA requires a gmail account(not a biggie but they collect your data) Piwik doesnt

Omniture has a poor real time integration. Piwik has great real time.

Piwik its not perfect and could use some new features to match more completely both Omniture and GA but it does a heck of a great job and the team behind it really pushes themselves and piwik gets better with time. Oh almost forgot the GA folks who will complain I forgot to mention about if one has an adwords account the sampling levels are higher or collecting 100% data. (But you still need a adwords acount and that isnt free.

GA has a beta real time but I noticed you need to be an admin to access. Piwik doesnt need it.

Enjoy Piwik!

Thanks but this is the troubleshooter/faq page I was referring to… it hasn’t helped.

And from my reading of the forum, it seems that anyone who says ‘piwik isn’t tracking’ gets sent here and that’s the end of it.

What I want to know is, what do we do if that doesn’t resolve the issue?

What is the next step in the debug process???

I definitely see all the advantages of Piwik over Google, and I would very much like to use it, but I don’t know what else to try to make it work and I can’t find anything in the documentation or the forums to give me any clues.

I saw similar queries with no real answer in the forum, so I guess what I’m asking for isn’t available but if it’s there and I just missed it, I’d appeciate a link?

Thanks

ok i see the issue.

The site you mention some are blogs and some are not how is google working these situations?

Typically blogs are built differently than regular sites the the code implementation will be different.

the server is it a domain or a subdomain?

You are using unix apache but are you using multiple sites via virtual hosting? Is it a custom install server or a host like hostgator?

Once you have all those questions answered then if all is ok you can compare the pages reported in google VS the pages reported in piwik. You can see what pages piwik is not reporting on as you may find a whole slew of pages are missing piwik code.

I had seen once someone else similar to you whereby the realized they had missed a whole section.

Piwik code could be place comprably to GA code if that helps guide you. The frustration you and many others have is the serving environments are all so custom and people dont realize all teh components used to serve web pages. blogs like wordpress VS php VS ajax each need to be treated differently.

Thanks for that … I actually have a standard header/footer files for each website and was fairly careful about changing them all. With the blogs I added the code directly into the same place on the templates and even there, some work, some don’t, no pattern that I could spot.

What concerns me most is a html/php site that uses one header/footer site-wide.

I added the code there several days ago and have yet to recoerd a single hit there, even though the logs are showing over a thousand hits since then.

Just to confirm I added Firestats earlier today and it’s tracking perfectly… 100+ hits since I added that, but still no data on Piwik.

My best guess at this stage is there might be some incompatibilities with various javasacripts on some sites/blogs and Piwik … though I use similar scripts on multiple sites and can’t spot a pattern.

For now though, I’ve haven’t got the time to debug each site individually, especially as it appears that even if I do get it working it might not be accurate?

All very frustrating as Piwik looks like it could be really good when it’s working right.