How reliable is Statify in recording page visits?

  • Resolved davex6

    (@davex6)


    1 year ago

    I have suspected for a while that not all page visits are being recorded. For example, after posting the page link on a forum, I got feedback such as ‘Thanks for that’, etc. Yet Statify recorded no visits for that day. I cannot, of course, be 100% sure the people writing back that they thought it was a useful resource actually visited the page.

    Another red flag is when I haven’t had a visit for, say, a week; however, looking at the Hostinger analytics it shows thousands of https requests, and tens of Gigabytes bandwidth used, in the last 7 days.

    The Statify filter is deactivated, and have checked the ‘JavaScript based tracking with nonce check’ option.

    Is something strange going on, or am I misunderstanding?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi there!

    It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on here without digging further. However, I assume that for the first part, the user just doesn’t visit the page at all.

    For the second, it’s very likely that your hoster also considers bot/crawler requests in its statistics, which totally makes sense here, since it tracks HTTP(S) requests.

    You can look into your actual server access logs to check what’s true here.

    Best regards,
    Matthias

    Plugin Support Stefan Kalscheuer

    (@stklcode)

    It’s not only bots and crawlers, also error pages, logged-in users, access to the admin dashboard, etc.

    And a fair amount of HTTP(S) requests is simply additional resources, images, videos, scripts, stylesheets, fonts, icons, API calls, … So one real page “visit“ can easily make 20 requests – of which Statify counts 1.

    Also the Statify tracking via JS itself is one additional request, which at least doubles the numbers in the access logs.

    There is a chance that Statify is misconfigured and thus counts less hits than it should. E.g. when using a “long“ page cache that exceeds nonce lifetime (default is 12h IIRC). In this case you might see numerous requests to the Statify endpoint with error 403 in the logs.

    But after acc, a factor of let’s say 10 to 100 (strongly depends on some factors) between actual page views by humans and HTTP requests in the access logs is something you should expect in normal operation.

    Thread Starter davex6

    (@davex6)

    Many thanks for the replies.

    I had not thought so much about bots/crawlers, but it makes sense that these would be counted by Hostinger analytics.

    When you mention ‘misconfigured’, do you think I should alter the tracking method ‘JavaScript based tracking with nonce check’ to ‘without nonce check’ option? In the last 7 days there have been 288 403 requests.

    Plugin Support Torsten Landsiedel

    (@zodiac1978)

    In this case you might see numerous requests to the Statify endpoint with error 403 in the logs.

    In the last 7 days there have been 288 403 requests.

    Hi @davex6,

    if those 403 requests are the result for our statify.min.js call via admin-ajax.php then you need to adjust the caching time or the nonce lifetime. Disabling the nonce check should work too, but adjusting the cache lifetime would be preferred.

    All the best
    Torsten

    P.S.: Sorry for delay, I think @kittmedia and @stklcode missed your reply (or forgot to manully subscribe to the thread) …

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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