Use javascript and server logs for tracking

corin · October 29, 2017, 7:06pm

Is it possible to use both the default javascript and apache server logs in the same time?

Lukas · October 29, 2017, 7:08pm

Hi,

This is definitely an important feature for the long time future of piwik, but it needs major changes in Piwik and probably won’t happen soon.

You can find more information here:

github.com/matomo-org/matomo

Allow to use JavaScript tracking and Log Analytics at the same time, and merge the data / deduplicate to avoid double counting

opened 10:12PM - 30 Jan 16 UTC

hpvd

Enhancement

Sometimes more than one data source is available for description/documentation o…f the same activity. **In most cases the data source have different strength and also weakness. But combining them, the image of reality is always better** than only using one source. To give an example: there is a place with two different cameras looking at it from two different directions. One of the camera is a HD Color camera, mounted in a height of 10m and the other one is an black&white model, with lower resolution, mounted in a height of 2m, but it can make pictures also in the dark. Both on their own can't document everything happening all day long on the place in perfect quality. But together they doesn't miss anything. **The same situation exists when trying to track activities using Piwik:** **In the future when Piwik will become a "universal activity tracker" with v3 but also today when tracking "only" websites.** With **Piwik's java script tracking** you can track many many details. But there are things that may block Piwik's js: browser settings, browser add ons etc. In this case these visits are not tracked. And what is even more worse from statistics pov: one do not only not now what these visitors have done, but one do not know how many visits were missed. With this some numbers in statistics like number of total visitors are bably broken. This may have effects on other things like e.g.Conversion rate not only in ecommerce (numbers of vistors/reached goals), impression counting when doing advertisments, etc. With **Piwik's analyses of server log files**, all visitors are tracked -always. But not with that great details js tracking can do. => **So why not making it possible to use data from different source and combine the best of both worlds to build a perfect image of reality?** When starting structural work on the core of Piwik for v3.0, it is a perfect point to think of these possibilities.

corin · October 29, 2017, 8:19pm

Thank you for your quick response. I just thought it’s just too good to be true

I still love piwik anyways, this combination with the server logs would make piwik the ultimate tracking software because as the OP on github said

all visitors are tracked -always

Anyways, I went on in creating a separate website tracking profile to import the server logs separately but run into a different issue: Cannot connect to piwik when using import_logs.py to import server logs