Ben Sibley

Got it, thank you!

I am able to recreate this bug in version 2.8.9, and can confirm it is resolved in version 2.9.0. We are releasing this update to everyone over the next 24 hours, so you will see the update notification in your Plugins menu soon.

I’m sorry to hear about this bug. Could you let us know the timezone your site is using? It sounds like there could be an issue with recognizing the timezone’s Daylight Savings Time, bumping the dates into the wrong days.

We are also releasing version 2.9 today, which may resolve this issue.

Could you explain more about this issue? We are not aware of any bugs with the Geographic report at this time.

Also, please note that sales reporting is a feature of Independent Analytics Pro, and this review should be for the free version of Independent Analytics.

Hi there,

Thanks for using Independent Analytics!

These are the headers that IA checks, in this order:

• HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR
• HTTP_X_FORWARDED
• HTTP_FORWARDED_FOR
• HTTP_FORWARDED
• REMOTE_ADDR
• HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP
• HTTP_CLIENT_IP
• HTTP_INCAP_CLIENT_IP
• HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP

It sounds like one of these could be returning the location of the CDN or server, rather than your location. If you have a custom configuration, we have an easy way to supply a custom header instead: https://independentwp.com/knowledgebase/developer/detect-ip-address-custom-headers/

That will allow you to use a different header to get the proper IP address from the visitor.

No worries, thanks for letting me know. Two pre-made reports is normal. We’ll continue debugging.

@wpmansour Thanks for such a fast response! We’ll be happy to provide any info the dev team needs, and feel free to reach out to [email protected] if you’d prefer to continue the conversation over email.

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 6 days ago by Ben Sibley.

@tdebaillon Could you check something for me? I’d like to know if you see data in the Devices report and if you see the following file in the plugin:

wordpress/wp-content/plugins/independent-analytics/temp/device-detector.json

Hi @aenea, the latest version of Independent Analytics is fully compatible with WP 6.6.2. We need to update this value in one of the files in our next update.

Okay we’ll do some testing to see if we can recreate this. Are you publishing a post on a private FB page you run? I want to make sure we repeat something similar in case it depends on where the content is posted to FB.

Are you running version 2.8.8 of Independent Analytics?

There could be other bots finding the links posted to FB and crawling them, but I’m not sure if that would be possible for a private post. Do you have any security tools for blocking malicious bots? Cloudflare works well as does the free Shield Security plugin. Using one of them would help rule out the possibility that these are visits from “bad bots.”

When you get a traffic spike like this, it would also be interesting to see the data in the Geographic report. I’m curious to see if the visitors are all from the same location or not.

I’m sorry to hear that didn’t help. I still think it is most likely these are human visitors spending less than 10s on the website, and therefor being counted by IA but not GA. The bot detection script we use is developed and open sourced by Matomo, so it is used across all of their user’s websites and our 70k+ installations. We would be getting a lot of reports of this error over the past year and seeing it from our own FB posts as well if the FB bots were getting past detection.

Okay thank you for trying that. Please let me know if blocking this bot via robots.txt changes the results you see in the Analytics.

This is one of Meta’s documented bots, which we detect and ignore using the following Regex pattern: facebook(?:catalog|externalhit|externalua|platform|scraper)

Here is a link to the patterns we use to detect all known Facebook bots: https://plugins.trac.www.ads-software.com/browser/independent-analytics/trunk/vendor/matomo/device-detector/regexes/bots.yml#L554. If the visitors aren’t being caught by those patterns, then they are either human visitors or “bad bots” coming through the FB link.

In GA4, the metrics are all very specific and there isn’t a metric called “Visitors.” In most screens, they display a metric called “Active Users” and this metric has a few stipulations. For example, a visitor isn’t considered an Active User unless they spend at least 10 seconds on the page. Their visit also won’t be counted as a “Session” unless it meets the same criteria. I’m guessing that this is the crux of the issue. Independent Analytics is counting everyone who reaches your site via FB and many of these visitors only spend a few seconds before leaving. GA4 is only counting the folks who spend at least 10 seconds on the site, and so the number is much lower.