Removing URL parameters from downloads

General questions
1

Hello all,

we use Matomo to track the number of visits and downloads from our website. The links to the download files contain a date parameter that we would like to exclude from the analysis. We have added the Date parameter to the ignored parameters. The parameter is correctly ignored in the evaluation of page views, but it still appears in the download figures, making it impossible to figure out how often a file was downloaded.
For all file extensions that generate a web page (html, asp, php…) the behaviour works as desired, but not for downloads of a . pdf file. Is there a way to ignore parameters in download links?
Thank you!

2

The built-in support for ignoring URL parameters is for page views, but is not for file downloads. You can do two things:

  • Modifying the download URLs: If you have control over the website’s codebase, you can modify how download links are structured so that the date parameter doesn’t affect tracking. .

  • Using Matomo’s JavaScript Tracking Client: If you’re open to using JavaScript, Matomo provides a JavaScript tracking client.

_paq.push(['trackLink', urlWithoutParameters, 'download']);

You can use this to manually track downloads without the date parameter.

3

Is there a way to ignore specific parameters from the Downloads URLs?
For instance, ignore the Version of PDF but show the Date of the PDF.
The code above is too generic since it will ignore all parameters:

_paq.push([‘trackLink’, urlWithoutParameters, ‘download’]);

Thanks in advance