Excluded event - Session exceeded max configured length

Data collection and tags
1

Hi

I am getting quite a few of these “Excluded events” in the tracker debugger - “Exclusion reason: Session exceeded max configured length”. What is the reason for this and is there something specific I should look for?

Thanks,

2

Hello @thpe,

Those “Excluded events” are related to sessions longer than 12 hours. We define a max session time length of 12 hours, after which events can’t be collected for a session.
Previously they were not displayed in the Tracker debugger and we fixed that with the latest product release.

Sessions longer than 12 hours are often the result of bot traffic that has “gone through” (wasn’t recognized by) our bot filters. Are you noticing any patterns for sessions that have those excluded events? That could be for example similarities in the device or browser used for that session.

In the case of regular traffic, sessions are closed when they stop being active. You can even improve the accuracy there by calculating the session time more precisely.

3

Hi Piotrek

Thanks for your reply. The sessions have exactly the same characteristics (see below) and they are revisting the same page repeatedly many times within a few hours. And the again the same pattern on a later date. This seems to support your bot theory - is there anything we can do?

Visitor ID: 0000000000000000
Cookie ID: 0000000000000000

Engagement: Returning visitor
Channel: Direct entry
Goals converted: 0

JavaScript Tracking Client 2.9.0
JavaScript Tracking Client using Tag Manager 2.9.0

Unknown browser Unknown operating system

Location: Unknown

4

You can filter bots by using a neat trick in Tracker debugger - you can preview the raw requests that were sent by those bots. Each of those requests corresponds to events and contains a User Agent - a piece of information that you can use in the Administration menu to filter traffic.

Here’s an article that describes it in more detail: How can I ignore traffic from bots and crawlers? | Piwik PRO help center

Before you filter the traffic, it’s best to make sure that it’s not real traffic. For example, by seeing if your own traffic (your own visit to the website or your own mobile app usage) isn’t classified in that way.

5

Thanks for the link. It doesn’t seem to me to be an option because there is not much information to go on:

Devices & platform
Unknown browser Unknown operating system

Location
Location: Unknown

  1. So as I understand it there is really no information to build the filter with?
  2. Do I understand it correctly if this traffic is already excluded in the reports - but just not in the tracker debugger?

Thanks again for the help.

6

Yes, it’s excluded. What about using IP addresses to keep it clean? IMO it makes sense to filter it out just to make sure that bots don’t consume traffic.

7

We are using full IP-masking, so I assume that would not work?

8

IP masking is done after checking the IP blacklist, so you can still use it.

9

I am not sure where I would get the relevant IP from (as there are no IP-addresses in the tracker debugger) or where to add them. Do you have a link to some documentation of how to use the blacklist?

10

You’re right. I thought tracker debugger shows full IP addresses (with a really short retention period). I’ll fill in a feature request to the product team.

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