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General Questions

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What is a session?

A session is a group of page hits from the same visitor within a 30-minute window. If a visitor is inactive for more than 30 minutes and then returns, a new session starts.

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How is bounce rate calculated?

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions with only one page view. A “bounced” session means the visitor viewed only one page and then left.

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What data does the plugin use?

The plugin processes data from Mautic’s page_hits table - the same data Mautic already collects from your tracking script. No additional tracking is required.

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Traffic Detection

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How are traffic sources detected?

The plugin uses multiple signals to categorize traffic:
  1. Referrer URL - Matched against known search engines, social networks, and AI assistants
  2. UTM parameters - utm_medium=cpc indicates paid traffic, utm_medium=email indicates email
  3. Click IDs - gclid, fbclid, msclkid, etc. indicate paid advertising
  4. Mautic source field - Internal email or campaign sources

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What search engines are detected?

Over 50 search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Yandex, and many regional search engines. The detection uses Matomo’s comprehensive search engine database.

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What social networks are detected?

Over 60 social networks including Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, and many more.

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What AI assistants are detected?

The plugin detects traffic from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Bard/Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and 30+ other AI tools and platforms.

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Privacy

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Does the plugin respect Do Not Track?

Yes. The plugin’s tracking respects:
  • DNT (Do Not Track) browser setting
  • GPC (Global Privacy Control) signal
When these signals are present, tracking is disabled.

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Are bots filtered out?

Yes. The plugin uses Matomo’s Device Detector library to identify and filter out known bots and crawlers from analytics data.

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What data is stored?

Session data includes:
  • Entry and exit URLs (without query strings containing personal data)
  • UTM parameters
  • Traffic source and type
  • Device type and OS
  • Country (from Mautic’s existing geo-detection)
  • Session duration and page count
  • Whether the visitor is identified in Mautic
No additional personal data is collected beyond what Mautic already tracks.

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Technical Questions

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What database tables does the plugin create?

Two tables are created:
TablePurpose
analytics_sessionsComputed visitor sessions with all metrics and attribution
analytics_page_hit_sessionsMaps page hits to sessions for efficient lookups

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How often should I run the session command?

For near real-time analytics, run every 5-15 minutes. The incremental update is very fast (typically under a second) because it only processes new hits.

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Can I rebuild sessions for a specific date range?

Yes, use the --rebuild --days=N option to rebuild only the last N days: 
php bin/console mautic:analytics:rebuild --rebuild --days=30

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Why do I see “Internal” traffic type?

Internal traffic means the referrer domain matches your website domain - the visitor navigated from one page of your site to another. This is only counted for the entry page of a session.

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The widget shows no data. What’s wrong?

  1. Make sure you’ve run the session computation command at least once
  2. Check that the date range in your dashboard includes dates with page hits
  3. Verify the plugin is enabled in Settings → Plugins