Transitions and Referrals

Hi all,

I have a question about the Behaviour > Transitions.

Let’s say the user does the following navigation, using two tabs in his browser.

homepage - - > url 1- - - - - - - > url 11 - - - - - - - - > url 111
		\
		 \
		  - - - - - - - > url 12 - - - - - - > url 121

I understand now that in the Log Visits report I have the time sequence, regardless of the tabs, i.e.:

homepage
url 1
url 12
url 11 
url 121
url 111

But I don’t understand why in the Transitions report for url 12 I see something like:

From url 1 — url 12 — To url 11

because it’s impossible to reach url 12 directly from url 1, and it’s also impossible to reach url 11 from url 12.

I think that the Transitions report should show the actual navigation (I mean: using the ref parameter), in that case:

From homepage — url 12 — To url 121

I think Matomo is not capable of manage such cases.
If you check the database, table log_link_visit_action, can you check if the idaction_url_ref / idaction_name_ref (there is a link to log_action table) are updated following the referrer received by the server, or just reading the DB to check the last page view? I think it does the 2nd case…

I’ll check the database the way you suggested.

But I am wondering if there is a good reason for matomo to consider the last page view (as it seems in that case) and not the ref parameter, that in my opinion would have given a more precise information about the user navigation.

By the way I have another question related to this.

Let’s say the user does the same navigation as described above (now I put also the times):

10:00          10:05                10:10                     10:30
homepage - - > url 1- - - - - - - > url 11 - - - - - - - - > url 111
		\
		 \                10:07                10:12
		  - - - - - - - > url 12 - - - - - - > url 121

In the Visit Log, I would see something like:

10:00 - homepage
10:05 - url 1
10:07 - url 12
10:10 - url 11 
10:12 - url 121
10:30 - url 111

What would happen to the “Avg. time spent on page”?

I.e. in the actual navigation from url 1 to url 11 (10:05-10:10), the time spent on page url 1 should be 5 mins.

If matomo considers the page sequence in cronological order (url 1 → url 12) instead of the actual navigation (url 1 → url 11), that means that the time spent on page url 1 is 2 mins (10:05-10:07)?

Probably this would complicate the visit analysis, as this is not a common user behavior… Also, how display such complicated journey?
(You can create some feature request for this: https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/issues/new?assignees=&labels=Enhancement&template=feature_request.md )

Good question! :thinking:
As how I understood the Matomo engine (but I may be wrong), when the url 12 is received, Matomo would store the time spent on url 1, and when the url 11 is received, Matomo would store the time spent on url 12
This must be experimented! :wink:

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