Hi,
I just installed Piwik on my Webserver and I think it is just great to see what brings people to my site.
Unfortunately, I cannot see how Piwik counts the Unique visitors since the number definitely seems to be too low.
My site is a Wordpress-Blog and I added the Piwik-script to my header. In this header I also have a counter which I programmed myself quite a time ago using PHP and MySQL.
Now this counter and the Piwik unique visitor count do differ significantly. I would first think that my counter-script was wrong since it just analyses the IP-address and tries not to count search robots.
But I have added my Blog to a syndicator site (jurablogs.com) which counts how many visitors use their outgoing links. Now everytime I post something Piwik seems does not seem to count all visitors.
An example: I added a post yesterday night and the syndicator site tells me that 21 visitors have used this link to visit my post. However, Piwik counts 9 unique visitors overall to my site today, only one of them coming from the syndicator site.
Now my own counter and the syndicator site counter tell me there are more visitors.
Does anyone know what is wrong? Should I add the Piwik-script to another page of my Wordpress-Blog?
I would assume that there is always a difference between different counters, the method of counting is not the same.
I think, that Piwik is setting a cookie to see if a user is coming back. If one with this cookie is coming back to the visited site at the same day, he will not be counted again. Your sysndicator site is counting all the clicks on your link, even when it´s clicked ten times by the same person.
But I wouldn´t think that the difference is so high (21 vs 1). Or did you click 21 times on the link for testing?
I installed Piwik and am having just the opposite problem. Piwik counts every click as a unique visitor (just my playing around with it I ended up with 50+ unique visitors… and they were all me using the same computer & web browser). I did read that Piwik uses a cookie to track the unique vistors and failing that (if the user blocks cookies) it uses some logic to determine if the user is the same (ip, web browser, etc).
Not sure what I am doing wrong. I stuck the js in the footer file that loads with every page.
[quote=Brianna007 @ Jan 27 2009, 02:27 PM]I installed Piwik and am having just the opposite problem. Piwik counts every click as a unique visitor (just my playing around with it I ended up with 50+ unique visitors… and they were all me using the same computer & web browser). I did read that Piwik uses a cookie to track the unique vistors and failing that (if the user blocks cookies) it uses some logic to determine if the user is the same (ip, web browser, etc).
Not sure what I am doing wrong. I stuck the js in the footer file that loads with every page.[/quote]
we are going to address this issue early this week in 0.2.29
in the meantime, make sure “enable_detect_unique_visitor_using_settings” is set to true in config/global.inc.php