Introduction to Page Analytics Reports

Page analytics help you to understand how people navigate through your site and what content is most popular at a given time so you can optimise under-performing areas and replicate winning content formulas. The main area for reviewing page analytics within Matomo is the Behaviour section of the main navigation.

The Page Analytics Reports

Within the Behaviour section you will find links to the following page reports:

• Pages – General overview of the popularity of pages on your site.
• Entry Pages – Provides an overview of how many people enter your site from a specific page and how many of those instantly leave.
• Exit Pages – Provides an overview of which pages people most commonly exit your site from.
• Page Titles – This provides an overview of the popular sections of your site based on the page titles. It can be a little less specific than the Pages report.

Each of these page reports are presented as hierarchical tables by default. They all share a similar configuration with some common features and metrics which are discussed in the following section.

Identify Your Most Popular Pages with the Pages Report

If you want to know which pages are most popular on your site, you should review the Pages report. To access this report, make sure you are logged in to your dashboard and click Behaviour in the main navigation on the left hand side. Next, click on the Pages link below it to load a paginated table which lists all of the pages on your site. The Pages report shows you the following metrics by default:

• Pageviews – How many unique times the page has been loaded.
• Unique Pageviews – How many unique visitors have loaded the page.
• Bounce Rate – The percentage of people that immediately leave after viewing a page.
• Avg. Time on Page – The amount of time users spend on the page on average.
  Note: Some pages will naturally have shorter average times like gateway pages used to navigate your site. While others should have a longer time on page, such as long articles. It helps to understand the context of a page to know if this is important.
• Exit Rate – The percentage of visitors who leave the site after viewing a specific page.
• Avg. Page Load Time – The amount of time spent waiting for a page to load; from the moment the user requests a page until it has fully completed processing.

By default, the tables are listed in order of Unique Pageviews numbers. However, you can sort the order of pages in this table by any of the above metrics. Sorting by differing metrics can help you discover the top (and worst) performing pages for each. To sort by an alternative metric, click on the title of the column you want to sort by and the data will reload sorted by this metric.

You can also click the currently selected metric (represented by the sort icon ) to toggle and reverse the sort, so that you can review either the lowest or highest performing pages first. The icon flips vertically to indicate whether the metric is being sorted from highest to lowest or lowest to highest

Switching between hierarchical and flat reports

Page reports are shown hierarchically by default. Hierarchical reports make it easier to navigate your analytics for large sites by rolling up the metrics for sub-pages into their top-level page.

However, if you want the metrics for individual pages within a section you can click on the plus icon to expand the pages under that level. When you are finished reviewing an expanded row, you can click on the minus icon to contract the table.

The screenshot above shows the expanded view of the my-account page. All of the pages indented below my-account are sub-pages. For example, the orders page would actually be found at /my-account/orders/. Where you see a page called /index, that means it is the default page at the top level of a directory. So in this case, accessing /my-account/ or /my-account/index would take you to the same page. It is also worth noting that the top level metrics are equal to the sum of the sub-pages totals.

And last but not least, you can hover over the table and click the cog icon and select the Make it flat menu item to completely flatten the table results. When you flatten the report, the full URL of every page gets its own row, so you can analyse individual pages instead of grouped sections. .

Analyse site sections by searching within page reports

You can also search for specific pages or sections of pages within your pages reports. To do this, load the table as usual. Hover your mouse over the table, then click on the green search icon that appears at the bottom left of the table. From here you can type in a search term such as my-account to find any pages that contain the search string within the URL. Continuing the aforementioned example, the following pages could all appear:

One other tip that can be useful is to use Segments when reviewing certain pages or sections of your site. For example, if you are reviewing engagement with account related pageviews then it may make sense to use a segment that only includes customers so you get data based on the people that can access the full versions of a page.