I know this has been discussed before - but I seem to have an extreme example of it . . .
Awstats says my site gets 400K page views a month
Matomo (self hosted JS version) says I get 36K.
I’m stuggling to understand how there can be a difference of more than 10 times?
The ‘visitors’ number is also radically different. But ‘only’ by a factor of 2 or so, Which I can live with.
But 10x difference? rly? Anyone know what’s going on?
Two possible reasons:
- Lots of rogue bots on your website
- Some technical issue on your Matomo tracking (e.g. there are “pages”, or resolvable URLs, without the tracking code)
Hmm . . . I’ve done some further investigations. Yes, there were indeed some ‘rogue’ bots (ones which didn’t obey the robots.txt file). I’ve now implemented a small app which blocks them. But it’s made little difference.
But, on another forum, I’ve found what’s going on . . .
Matomo (JS tracking) is completely disabled (i.e. bypassed) in browsers which use ‘adblock’ software such as uBlock.
To recap - I’m not just getting small anomalous differences between Matomo results and the Awsats log - in terms of pageviews, it’s 10 times less
I don’t know what percentage of my site visitors use adblock extensions, but it looks like a lot.
As a test I’ve now implemented another workaround which ‘turns off’ the adblock bypassing - and I’ve got the Matomo results down to merely 5 times worse (instead of 10).
To sum up. This appears to be a really serious problem with JS- based trackers. So serious it should certainly be flagged to anyone installing the self-hosted JS version.
Until people strop using adblockers (unlikely?) Matomo JS tracking is not going to provide anywhere near accurate figures.
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Hi, has anything significantly changed since your post, and, are you still using matomo? We encounter the same issue. Could you maybe share (a link to) the ‘adblock’ workaround you mentioned? Thanks a lot.
The substantial difference between the page view counts reported by Awstats and Matomo can be attributed to various factors. Awstats analyzes server log files, capturing all requests including those from bots, whereas Matomo relies on JavaScript tracking code, potentially missing visits if JavaScript is disabled. Bot filtering effectiveness, caching, data processing methods, and timezone settings can also contribute to the variance. To address this, review both tools’ configurations, compare metrics, and consider using additional analytics tools for cross-referencing. Ultimately, focusing on trends rather than absolute numbers can provide valuable insights despite discrepancies.