What are the required conditions for visits from different users within the same organization to be recorded under the same Visitor ID?
I have noticed that this happens in some cases, but not always. For example, I asked a colleague to visit two specific pages on our website, and afterwards I visited two other pages myself. When I checked the Tracker debugger, I saw that both of our visits appeared under the same Visitor ID.
There were also other events in the same flow, triggered by other users. A few hours later, when I checked the Tracker debugger again, there were already over 200 events associated with the same Visitor ID. This is very confusing and clearly distorts the analytics statistics if many sessions done by many users is shown as one session.
Piwik PRO by default uses a session hash to separate session from visitor one and visitor two.
In case devices that are similar, in the properties they send out, coming from the same IP address, there can be cases that they end up in the same session (as you are dealing with)
The solution would be to disable session hash and rely on cookies:
Keep in mind when turning off Session hash, to turn on Use visitor cookies, otherwise each event will end up as a new session and visitor.
Make sure to validate this with your privacy officer.
We use cookie consenting on all our websites. And all sites have ‘Use a session hash’ and ‘Use visitor cookies’ enabled in the privacy/compliance settings.
Based on the article ‘How can I turn off a session hash’, I understood that disabling session hashes is safe for us. The only data loss is IP addresses that we do not use anywhere or in any way. Or am I missing something important?
Indeed, when you currently have both Use session hash and Use visitor cookies, it would be best to disable the use session hash, both pre and post consent.