Dear fellow Matomo users,
I am working for a small non-profit online university. We offer short courses and try to give our professors feedback about their courses traffic performance with the e-mail reports.
My goal ist to report about:
- Page URLs
- Entry Pages
among some others, but for the sake of the discussion even one is enough.
To create a report, I create a segment first with a rules set looking like this:
Action URL contains “projects/<cours_url>”
Download URL contains “projects/<cours_url>”
Entry Page URL contains “projects/<cours_url>”
Exit Page URL contains “projects/<cours_url>”
Page URL contains “projects/<cours_url>”
Event URL contains “projects/<cours_url>”
Media resource URL contains “projects/<cours_url>”
When I now review the data for e.g. November 2021 I get that I have one:
20 visits with Entry page and 14 unique Pageviews (42 Pageviews) among the PageUrls segment in the report (mirroring what I see in the Pages Widget).
I have two issues:
I. Inconsistent counts:
- When I use Live.getLastVisitsDetails on each day of the month (with further_params: &filter_limit=-1&countVisitorsToFetch=10000)
- Aggregate those and filtering through each and every visits actionDetails and sum up each and every action that contains a ‘url’ containing the above mentioned project indicating substring “projects/<course_url>” I arrive at 371 pageviews, 92 visits with at least one action containing the substring “projects/<course_url>” and 74 with even the first action (entry page?) with an url containing “projects/<course_url>”.
II. Foreign data:
- When I create / deliver the e-mail reports the sections about e.g. Entry Page do not just contain urls with the substring “projects/<course_url>” but additionally, I get a couple other urls which have nothing to do with the project.
“[About the image: black are url substrings containing the <course_url> in question, orange, green, red and violet are other, different urls of the same courses website, but unrelated otherwise.]”
When I use the Reporting APIs: Actions.getEntryPageUrls I arrive at a count of 20 for all the pages belonging to “projects/<course_url>”
[[’/projects/<course_url>/pages/biogene-kraftstoffe-regularien’, 10],
[’/projects/<course_url>/preview’, 4],
[’/projects/<course_url>/pages/biogene-kraftstoffe-technologie-2’, 3],
[’/projects/<course_url>/pages/mobil-cast-biogene-kraftstoffe’, 2],
[’/projects/<course_url>/pages/teaser-folge’, 1]]
What can I do? Or what constraints are missing to explain that gaps to bridge them? Do I have to configure the preprocessing of the reports differently and when where? Do I do something wrong with the tracking script already?
I also looked into the individual types of all the actions, and about 90% are of type 13 (=pageview), so this cannot be the reason. Also I repeated the “experiment” with narrower segment definitions e.g. only:
Entry Page URL contains “projects/<cours_url>”
Exit Page URL contains “projects/<cours_url>”
Page URL contains “projects/<cours_url>”
Or even only Page Url Contains “projects/<course_url>”
And for multiple other projects/<course_url>.
Is there something I a missing? Otherwise I would in future stick with my own analysis of the Live.Live.getLastVisitsDetails… (which would have its merits anyway, as I am also not sure about the meaning of the bounce rate on a filtered segment of for e.g. the Page URLs as these may contain other entry pages then the "projects/<course_url>, I guess).
Did someone else had similar problems? How did you solve them?
Thank you so much and have a nice Advent season you all!
Kind regards
Frank