I don’t understand the reports. I have set up my page to automatically meta refresh redirect people after 1 second. There are no links or anything on the site, just a white page but some users seems to stay on that page for quite some time then revisit or refresh? Please explain it to me. I have added screenshots (2 sh into 1):
I am still looking for an answer to this. Some visitors even have 3-4 “folder” icons… that say they have stayed on the site from couple of seconds to several minutes. What does this behavior mean? Is the refresh-redirect failing? They should only be on the site for 1 sec till they get redirected.
Hey @Osavpoiss! If you have some default redirect enabled for your website or some page of it, for such case it could be useful if you could take a look into your access logs and compare it, these would definitely bring some specific answers on what is going on. Redirects are disregarded by default, so these “icons” are just shown for actual pageloads.
Ping me if you need some more answers!
@mgonera My site is created ONLY for redirecting and tracking the visitors. There are no other pages, it’s just blank homepage with meta refresh redirect tag with 1 sec delay so that Piwik scrip could fire and track the visitor data. Thus far it has worked nicely, I have inserted the Piwik code in the header, before redirect code. Can Piwik track even if the redirect would be 0 seconds?
Anyways, it definitely tracks the visitors when they enter the site atm. I am just confused what the people are doing for 13 sec or whatever the amount of time they are there. They can’t possibly be on the site for that long because the script should redirect them in 1 sec and there are no other pages to navigate there also.
Where can I find the access logs?
Thanks!
@Osavpoiss As you’re saying you put Piwik JS snippet before the meta-tag which does the redirect. It may be that your visitors browsers have hard time fetching Piwik.js for some reason. This is also something you could be able to pick up from access logs, but Piwik’s, not your site. Request to every resource is there so you can analyze what specifically is taking so long for the webpage to load.
Access logs (usually access.log) files are stored in directories configured in the web server. It depends whether you are privileged on accessing them in case of your hosting solution.
@mgonera My CPanel offers to download RAW access logs for domains. My piwik tracking code is set up on another domain but I need to download the access log of the domain that has piwik tracking system installed on it, correct?
I am seeing a lot of stuff there but I am not sure what I should be looking for. It has stuff like this in it:
84.XXX.252.4 - - [29/Jan/2016:05:10:42 -0600] “GET /piwik/piwik.js HTTP/1.1” 200 20631 “http://mysubdomain.domain.org/” “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_4_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/12H321 Twitter for iPhone”
I replaced some number in the IP with XXX and changed my domain name for privacy.
You should analyze it on both sides:
If such time is long maybe you should debug your website (for example using browser inspector, you can see which resource needs how much time to load). I would also test maybe some other method of redirection? I don’t know how site behaves when .js is being actually executed before meta-tag, so this might also be a reason.