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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