Zero unique visitors on N number of page loads?

[r-chris]

Hi, I am trying out fathom today and am feeding my fathom instance from 4 different sources. One of them is regularly accessed by a headless browser to perform tests. In the fathom dashboard I can see multiple page loads for that instance, but it specifies 0 unique visitors.

Am I correct to assume that fathom somehow tries to detect potential non-human visitors and doesn't count them or is this just a bug? It would be great if my headless access wasn't considered as a visitor, but shouldn't then the page loads also be at 0 ?

Thanks!

[dannyvankooten]

Hi @r-chris,

This is most likely a bug in how Fathom determines the "unique visitor" count. Currently it keeps track of the session on the client-side using a cookie which is valid for 24 hours. Only pageviews without this cookie (or rather; without this page's path in the cookie) will increment the unique visitor count for that page.

Ideally we would reset the session at 00:00 (like Google Analytics currently does) but this introduces other complexities like which timezone to use here, since we store sessions on the client.

Am I correct to assume that fathom somehow tries to detect potential non-human visitors and doesn't count them or is this just a bug? It would be great if my headless access wasn't considered as a visitor, but shouldn't then the page loads also be at 0 ?

Some user-agent filtering occurs on the server-side to strip out common bots, but we haven't put too much effort into this just yet.

I've ran into this issue myself too (when working on Fathom on consecutive days) so will do some thinking on how to best prevent this or at least how to prevent this from deflating the unique visitor count for that day too much.

[dannyvankooten]

This should be fixed by 70d97b0 but once we allow setting a custom timezone we may have to revisit this. But then there's a whole load of things to revisit once we do that, so I'll close this issue for now. 😄

[r-chris]

Thanks - that was very quick.