Visitor and unique Visitors are the same since setting "Also use the Anonymized IP addresses when enriching visits." to "No"

Support & Bugs
1

Due to incorrect geolocation resulting from our anonymized IP settings (2 bytes), we disabled the option “Also use the Anonymized IP addresses when enriching visits.” Since then geolocation works, but every visitor is counted as a unique visitor, causing both the visitor count and the unique visitor count to be identical.

Here are our current privacy settings:

  • IP-Masking: 2 bytes
  • Also use the Anonymized IP addresses when enriching visits: No
  • Replace User ID with a pseudonym: Yes
  • Anonymize Order ID: Yes
  • Force tracking without cookies: Yes
  • Anonymize Referrer: Don’t anonymize the referrer

Additionally, trust_visitors_cookies = 1 is not set.

We could simply re-enable “Also use the Anonymized IP addresses when enriching visits,” but I want to understand the underlying issue first. Could disabling “Force tracking without cookies” or setting trust_visitors_cookies = 1 help?

2

Hi @SKlocke
I think that Force tracking without cookies: Yes* + setting trust_visitors_cookies = 1 prevents Matomo to recognize returning visitor, as it does not have any more information to recognize it (I am not sure if it uses the user ID or not, in my experiments: not).
Then the only information left to recognize a visitor is… The IP! But I think that with partial IP, you’ll get more returning visitors than expected… (as several visitors will share the same IP part)