Heartbeat Pings Deactivated but Counter Keeps Increasing

Hi all, thanks in advance for any and all suggestions on the following matter!

I’m managing a client’s website tracking and a couple of days ago we noticed that heartbeat pings were rapidly eating away at the monthly limit of actions for our subscription plan. Because of that, we decided to deactivate them and we unflagged the option in the Piwik PRO Tag Template in Google Tag Manager (the implementation is done through GTM for a number of reasons).

Despite that, the counter for heartbeat pings in the subscription section of the admin panel is still increasing, although we’re no longer seeing heartbeat ping requests in the tracker debugger or in the network tab of Chrome devtools. Is this behaviour expected, or is something not working as intended? One thing I noticed is that the amount of heartbeat pings and pageviews is exactly the same, as if a ping request was sent with each pageview.

To add more context: the website is a single page application and we’re tracking pageviews manually with a pageview tag that activates on a “page rendered” data layer push. I can provide additional info if needed, including the configuration of the pageview tag and anything that may help me understand why this is happening.

Of course, if this is indeed working as intended, I know the only solution to this would be to upgrade the number of actions of our plan. But still, it seems strange to me that heartbeat pings are still increasing even if they are - supposedly - deactivated.

Thanks again!

Hi, once it’s disabled, you should not see them, so definitely there’s something wrong. I’d start by checking the tracker debugger if you can see any pings over there.

As for the same amount as for page views, it’s a standard thing. Most likely there are more pings than page views, but our billing model assumes that we don’t charge for more than the no. of page views.

Hi Kuba, once again thanks for the answer!

I checked in the tracker debugger and the only pings that I see are the performance ones, but they’re very rare and I know those are supposed to be there. As for the heartbeats, I checked again a few minutes ago and their counter has increased since last I checked yesterday.

I will certainly suggest my client to upgrade the tier of our subscription as even with just the pageviews we would go over our current limit, but I would like to solve this issue with heartbeat pings first as they’re basically doubling the volume of hits sent to Piwik and they would skew any kind of reasoning about how many actions we would need if we upgrade our subscription.

Cheers!

Can you share the website address or container code URL? I’d double-check if disabling heartbeats has been published. There is also an option that you’re using our GTM template and in this case, heartbeats have to be disabled over there instead of using our Tag Manager settings.

Hi Kuba,

the website address is Eataly sito ufficiale: spesa online, negozi, idee regalo, corsi | Eataly.

I am in fact using GTM for the implementation and I disabled the pings from the GTM Template for Piwik PRO. You can see in the following screenshot


the option “count session time precisely” is not flagged, and from what I read on Piwik’s documentation that is the option I needed to unflag if I wanted to deactivate pings.

The GTM container with that setup is the live one, published last week.

Ok, after some internal discussions (thanks @rmastop!) I guess we know what’s the reason. Most likely you generated a lot heartbeats before disabling them, much more than the no. of page views. So the counter will increase with each page view (I explained our billing logic earlier). So in the worst case scenario, heartbeats won’t be counted starting next month.

Thanks for escalating this Kuba, we will keep this monitored and let you know if that is indeed the case!

Just to let you know, heartbeats and page views have been showing the exact same amounts since last month at the very least. Can’t confirm before that because we just recently have been shared admin permissions on our agency Piwik account, so the subscription section of the admin panel is only showing current and last month actions data.

Sure. Please check it early January :slight_smile:

Hi Kuba, I just checked the admin panel and the situation is definitely way better than before: only 17 heartbeats ping since January 1st. I think the issue may be considered as solved, though I find it a bit odd that some heartbeats are still being sent even though I disabled them in the Piwik PRO tag template in GTM. Maybe it’s cache related?

Anyway, the issue is now a minor one and might as well be considered as solved. Thanks again!

Hi. IMO it’s cache related. Thanks for letting me know! :slight_smile: