I would like to know how one could best track languages and pages across a multilingual website.
Specifically, what I would seek to do would be to have multiple pages:
A visit to either of those pages should be counted as a hit of the page /mypage/ and on the side, there should be a statistic about the chosen languages. The content of those pages, except for the language, is exactly the same, so why would someone want to consider the pages as different ones?
I could manually push the page urls but that seems to me like a workaround, not a solution.
Also, I’d like to track the “user accepted languages”. I know that those are saved in the visitor log but I have not seen any chart. Did I miss something?
What would you do? Do you have any advises?
Thank you
each and every subdomain has its own id in matomo, so i got separated stats, and in all cases(98%) japanese will go only on the japanese website and so,
but I should say that they are not “exactly” the same … visual are adapted at the culture country for example japanese and chinese have mostly the same look which is quite different from the www - de - fr etc… BUT all the same thing inside
Your way is a method how to handle such things but there are nevertheless some things that bother me in your approach:
Your different “languages” seem to have different region contents. So they are targeted at different regions.
I’m rather in the case of a website available in a country whose citizens are fluent in multiple languages. Think of Belgium or Luxembourg. Nearly everybody there speaks at least 4 languages. The language versions are targeted at the same group of people. Or think of the European Union where you have a mix of many many languages and still you are not creating a version of your website for every country individually but a general one where de and fr have exactly the same information.
Having a different site-id for every language does not attack the following questions:
What language is used the most?
On what pages do the users switch languages the most?
What browser language do people have who look at the website in a certain language?
and many more questions that one could think about. And finally, all the hits and visitor counts that are displayed in Matomo need to be combined throughout the different language versions. Because it is, after all, a language, an user setting, and not a different information.
I now found a solution that seems to fit my needs but it doesn’t seem to fulfil the requirement to see on which page the most users switched the page. But it is way more clean than having multiple sites registered in Matomo.
For all those who are facing similar issues, here is what I did:
I used custom dimensions to set the site language and manually pushed it
I manually pushed the page url and replaced the language specific part by a neutral one: https://example.com/en/mypage/ to https://exampe.com/mypage/. This way, I gather all the languages of a certain language. However, the recorded URLs are not the real ones anymore, keep that in mind.
I think however that this should be easier as languages are extremely important. So I would love to see a build in way to do it. Until then, I guess my hack will do the trick.
Just wanted to post a quick message saying, we have a FAQ that explains how to do this. Please see the “STEP 2” in this FAQ for more information on the best way to track a multi lingual website(s) in Matomo to make data analysis easier. STEP 2 in https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/faq_35687/
