Analytics is not counting visitors

If the dashboard and the live view stay empty, that is almost always down to one of the checks that run before every measurement. These checks are hard-wired and run in a fixed order. Anyone who knows them finds the cause in a few minutes.

The order

The checks run in this order: external origin of the report, blocked IP, bot, excluded address, the main “Tracking active” switch, the module switches and finally the editor exclusion. The first condition that applies ends the processing. The server deliberately answers with a success status and states the reason instead of reporting an error — an error status would tempt the browser into retries.

Going through the switches

1. Open the “Kakapo Analytics” entry in the WordPress menu and switch to “Settings” (in German: „Einstellungen“) on the left in the “Administration” group.
2. In the “Tracking” card, check the “Tracking active” switch — if it is off, not a single module records anything.
3. In the “Collection” card, check whether the module for the empty report is switched on, for example “Page analysis”, “Click tracking” or “Live visitors”.
4. Watch out for the “Behavior events” switch: if it is off, page views are still counted, but click, scroll, rage, dead, form and link deliver nothing.
5. Then work through the “Exclusions” card from top to bottom.

The most common cause is you yourself

The “Exclude signed-in editors” switch is on out of the box: anyone who is logged in and may edit posts does not show up in the statistics. Your own views while signed in therefore appear nowhere. With the checkboxes below it you can limit the exclusion to individual areas — if nothing is ticked, it applies to all of them. That is the intended way to test the Heat Map or Session Recordings on your own site without distorting the rest of the count.

Exclusions and blocks

• “Blocked IP addresses” — the card names your current address and tells you whether it is already blocked or is currently being counted; single addresses, wildcards and CIDR for IPv4 and IPv6 are permitted
• If IPv6 ranges are listed there but your connection reports in with IPv4, the card explicitly points out that these rules do not take effect
• “Excluded addresses” — one rule per line, “*” stands for any characters, and what gets compared is the path of the reported address
• “Bot filter” — known bots, crawlers and headless browsers are detected server-side by their user agent and are not counted
• “Allow opt-out” — visitors can opt out of measurement via ?kwpa_optout=1, ?kwpa_optin=1 reverses it; the marker is stored in localStorage and applies per device and browser
• Reports whose origin points to an external host are not recorded — that is the very first check in the chain