What exactly are "user actions" when no custom events are defined?

Knowledge base
1

Hey guys,

I have a standard installation of piwik without custom events or goals defined…

In analysing some output data in excel from actions > pages, I see “user actions after entering here”. At first I assumed that these were clicks on links, but for two things:

  1. pages with 100% bounce rates (short time window) still show 1 “user actions after entering here” - does that mean that scrolling, clicking the back button or browser window close for instance is counted as an action?

  2. in page overlays, it shows that the email link is never clicked on, which I know is no the case.

I’m sorry if this is explained somewhere already, I did try a search and the FAQs but couldn’t it.

Thanks for helping me out.

2

Here’s how actions are defined: https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_23415/

This includes “visits a page”, which I believe explains why you still see an action when the bounce rate is 100% - each page visit counts as an action.

3

That’s actually a good question. I always assumed “user actions” referred to clicks as well, so it’s interesting that bounce sessions can still show activity. Looking forward to seeing the explanation from someone who knows how Matomo calculates these metrics behind the scenes.

4

The 100% bounce rate does not indicate that there were no actions. However, in Matomo/Piwik, the first page view is also considered an action and a bounced visit may have a record of 1 user action after entering here as the page view is part of the action count.

As far as the email link not counting in Page Overlay not all of the `mailto:` links are automatically tracked. While users may be clicking on email addresses, clicks may not be showing up in the overlay unless you have enabled outlink tracking or added event tracking to the links.

If it has begun recently, be sure to verify if JavaScript tracking is working correctly and if outlink tracking is configured in your Matomo setup.