Use case: how to track an information portal with Matomo Analytics?

The main thing to keep in mind is what are the goals of your information portal? Without this goal in mind you will end up with an endless measurement plan.

Let's see two use cases:

  • For profit information portal.
  • Non-profit information portal.

For profit information portal

High chances that your website relies on advertisements. As a result, your goal is achieved every time that an ad is displayed and/or is clicked. So here your goal is achieved every time that a given banner is displayed and/or clicked. You may also have to define a value for your goal according to the amount of money your advertiser is paying you.

Note that in many cases, tracking those ads will be difficult within Matomo as those ads belong to an ad server, so it is always easier to see your revenues directly on the website of the advertiser unless there is an easy API you can query to create an integration plugin for Matomo.

Non profit information portal

If you are a non profit information portal, you need to define when your goal is achieved, probably, you will consider that this is once the information is given, so you need to define what you will consider such as this. For example if on an information post, the reader went through 75% of the page then I consider that she/he read it entirely, that's your goal. Of course, it will be more reliable if you ask directly the question to the reader or give her/him a chance to say it, like a direct question or a pop-up.

Here is an example of how to define it as an event:


Note that you can change the track events into track goals the same way.

Out of the needs I see the most

  • How many clicks am I receiving on links.
  • Site search.
  • Carousel performances.
  • Pushing categories of content.
How many clicks I received?

There are three ways to measure it with Matomo:

  • Content tracking.
  • Page overlay.
  • Heatmap.
Site search

Mainly based on search query parameters. There is no such thing as abandonment rate in Matomo, though you can get the exit rate.

Carousel performances

In general in information websites, you will have carousels. You just need to find out the right component which is managing it.

Pushing categories of content

Like the tags associated to the content. For example, give me the category of content which belong to this class "cat-links".


Last modified: Thursday, 30 July 2020, 5:03 PM