Statistics suddenly tailed off

  • Resolved Mark Howells-Mead

    (@markhowellsmead)


    1 year, 6 months ago

    The website usually gets between 3,000 and 8,000 visitors per week. However, in the week of 12th – 18th August, the statistics dropped to zero and there have been no visits tracked since.

    The reporting is working and if I visit the site in an incognito browser tab, the real time view shows my visit. The site has been online and functions which allow visitors to submit data have been working fine. (We have received plenty of submissions.)

    Did anything change in the plugin in mid-August? Can you explain why there is no data being tracked from regular visitors?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 16 total)
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  • Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft

    (@dizzyatinnocraft)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    Hi @markhowellsmead, you can see the list of releases here: https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo-for-wordpress/releases . From that list you should see there was no release in mid-August.

    If visits are showing up in the real time visits reports but not in other reports, that means archiving isn’t running successfully. Do you see any error logs for archiving? If you run archiving manually via Matomo Analytics > Diagnostics > Troubleshooting, does data appear in the reports?

    If visits are showing up only for you in an incognito window (as in, there are no visits in the real time reports and the visitor log except your visits), that’s a bit stranger and will require a closer look.

    Thread Starter Mark Howells-Mead

    (@markhowellsmead)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    Thanks for your suggestions and for the link. I’ve looked at the stats in more detail for this website and I can see that there were between 0 and 10 visits registered per week during the interim period. Archival of the statistics is therefore happening as I believe it is intended.

    This was a very sudden change and doesn’t tie in the number of form submissions we received from website visitors over the same period. (We received more valid form submissions than there were visitors reported by the Matomo plugin.)

    Other websites in the same web hosting are not affected.

    Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft

    (@dizzyatinnocraft)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    I’ve looked at the stats in more detail for this website and I can see that there were between 0 and 10 visits registered per week during the interim period.

    Can you confirm that those visits appear outside of the Visits Log in normal reports (eg, the summary page)?

    This was a very sudden change and doesn’t tie in the number of form submissions we received from website visitors over the same period.

    If archiving is working then I’m not sure what the discrepancy could be due to. Can you share the number of form submissions you are receiving compared to visits? How are you tracking form submissions?

    Is it possible that users aren’t consenting to being tracked or have an adblocker in use or a combination of these two factors? If you can add whether a user consented to tracking to whatever mechanism you use to track form submissions you might be able to see if this is the case.

    Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft

    (@dizzyatinnocraft)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    Hi @markhowellsmead, were you able to resolve your problem? Do you still need help?

    Thread Starter Mark Howells-Mead

    (@markhowellsmead)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    The statistics for September are still reported as almost zero, but the statistics for November are 20,000+. Archiving has always worked correctly. I can’t provide the statistics for the form submissions because they’re passed through to Salesforce without being tracked specifically and the client doesn’t want to share this information. (They would’ve raised a ticket with me if the enquiries had dropped noticeably.)

    Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft

    (@dizzyatinnocraft)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    @markhowellsmead so it’s working for October, November, but not September is what you’re saying? Can you see visits in the Visits Log for September in an amount that’s comparable to October/November?

    Thread Starter Mark Howells-Mead

    (@markhowellsmead)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    There are pretty much no visits registered in September and 0 in <s>November</s> October. In all views. According to the hosting company’s own stats, we had around 40,000 unique visitors in September.

    Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft

    (@dizzyatinnocraft)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    I’m assuming that’s a yes for there are no visits in Visitors > Visits Log, which is different than all other reports that show archived reports. This report shows raw visit data and thus should display even if archiving isn’t running or is failing. Which means no visits are being tracked at all.

    Can you do the following:

    1. Open the Visits Log in one tab for today’s date
    2. Visit the website yourself
    3. Check that a request was made to matomo.php and is correct via the Developer Tools. If this request is not being made, then the problem is with the JavaScript tracking code.
    4. If the request is being made, check if your visit appears in the Visits Log. If it doesn’t, then it means requests aren’t being handled by Matomo, which suggests they are being blocked somehow. Perhaps by a firewall or webserver config.
    Thread Starter Mark Howells-Mead

    (@markhowellsmead)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    My visits appear in the logs and I can see my live actions in a second browser. There are no issues with November and December, only mid-August, September and October. My original statement, there have been no visits tracked since, is no longer correct.

    Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft

    (@dizzyatinnocraft)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    Ok, that’s good to know, that would mean that one of these two possible problems occurred from mid-August to October. Are you able to look through webserver access logs for mid-August to October? If you can, and you can see requests to http://yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/matomo/app/matomo.php then the problem would have been with the server not forwarding requests to matomo.php to handle. In this case, it is possible to recover this data. If this is not the case, then this data is unfortunately lost, as nothing was tracked during that time.

    In the future, to detect issues like this quickly, it might be useful to setup a custom alert that checks if, for example, no visits are recorded for a day and email you so you can take a look immediately: https://matomo.org/guide/manage-matomo/custom-alerts/

    Thread Starter Mark Howells-Mead

    (@markhowellsmead)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    That file was called 152 times in August but not at all in September or October. I’ll take a look at the custom alerts for future problems.

    Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft

    (@dizzyatinnocraft)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    Ok, then at this point there’s nothing more to do (except maybe for August if there are requests made for later parts).

    Before I mark this issue as resolved, can you confirm that normal report data (as in reports that aren’t the Visits Log) have data for November & December and look ok?

    And also if you ever need to recover data when there are requests to matomo.php in your access logs, you may want to look at our log importer tool: https://matomo.org/guide/tracking-data/import-server-logs/ using the “replay tracking” feature.

    Actually, I think I overlooked something. If you have the access logs you might be able to recover at least part of that data by using the log importer normally. If you’d like more information about how to do this, let me know.

    Thread Starter Mark Howells-Mead

    (@markhowellsmead)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    The problem is not resolved because we couldn’t find out the cause. However, there are server statistics available from the web hosting company, which I might import if the client requests it.

    Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft

    (@dizzyatinnocraft)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    The cause is that tracking from the browser stopped working from mid-August to October. You’ll want to look at changes made to the website around those dates to see why tracking requests weren’t being sent. However, since it is well past October, you may not be able to find the precise change in the website.

    Since the problem is due to the website/tracking code, and not due the plugin itself, and since it is too late to find the precise cause, I consider the issue resolved on our end. If you need help importing logs, please create a new issue.

    Thread Starter Mark Howells-Mead

    (@markhowellsmead)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    You’ll want to look at changes made to the website around those dates

    There were no changes made to the hosting or to the website in August. It is a maintained project and so any changes are documented and trackable. That’s why I raised this ticket.

    the problem is due to the website/tracking code, and not due the plugin itself

    Does that mean that the tracking code is not in the plugin?

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 16 total)
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