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Answer analytics question: How many users visit the library on a daily basis?
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Description

How many users visit the library on a daily basis?

Because matomo only has the request path and the user agent (no ip address, user id, session id, etc), it's treating slightly spaced out requests from the same visitor as coming from unique visitors. To answer the question, we'll need to look into how best to measure unique visitor counts while preserving privacy.

Information on how matomo identifies unique and returning visitors:
https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_21418/

Note that we don't store:

  • cookies
  • ip addresses
  • screen resolution
  • browser extensions

Because we're importing logs rather than using javascript. More information on how that impacts identifying unique daily users
https://matomo.org/docs/log-analytics-tool-how-to/#differences-using-log-analytics-vs-using-javascript-client

Event Timeline

jsn.sherman added a subscriber: Samwalton9-WMF.

As it stands, each visit is basically counted as coming from a unique visitor. Probably the least invasive thing we can do to improve our unique visitor fingerprinting would be to add a 24-hour cookie back into the mix. Is that a thing we should look into @Samwalton9?

Due to the necessity of adding invasive tracking to distinguish individual users, we have opted against tracking this data. We'll use our proxy measures of how many users initiate searches, access EZProxy content, and cite sources to evaluate the library's impact.