Insights, guides, and best practices for privacy-first marketing intelligence.
The little flag next to each visitor in Matomo isn't guessed from language or timezone; it's the country your geolocation database resolved from the visitor's IP. So a wrong flag is almost always a geolocation problem, not a flag problem. Here's how country detection actually works, why one looks wrong, and how to swap the icons.
Two campaign-tracking symptoms come up constantly in Matomo 5.x: the Campaigns report stays empty even though tagged links get visits, and the visit log shows ?gad_source=1 instead of your UTM parameters. Neither is usually a bug. Here's the mechanism behind each and exactly how we fix them.
Matomo's visitor numbers stop being mysterious once you know how it decides who is who and when it starts counting again. Here's the recognition model underneath unique visitors, visits, and unique pageviews in Matomo 5, plus why daily uniques don't sum and how server-side tracking splits one person into many.
The event happened on your server, not in a browser, so the JavaScript snippet never saw it. Here's how to record it with Matomo's HTTP Tracking API: the parameters that actually matter, when you need token_auth, and whether you can stop strangers spamming the public matomo.php endpoint.
Matomo 5.8 added an 'AI Chatbot Requests' column to the All Websites dashboard plus a set of AI Assistants reports, and the names all sound the same. Here's what each of the three reports measures, why the chatbot numbers look so small, and how to get that column off your dashboard without switching tracking off.