We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Matomo (Piwik) 1.8.1 after 3 months of development and testing.
- Download link
- How to update Matomo?
- List of all tickets closed: Changelog
Matomo 1.8 is packed with very useful new features, so please take some time to read through the notes to make sure you make the most of Matomo.
What’s new in Matomo 1.8?
Below we will describe all new features and improvements, and display screenshots.
New powerful feature: Historical Analytics Report of any row
Row Evolution allows to visualize a detailed report for a given row in any report table in Matomo.
You can now hover over the row and see the graph icon. Click on it to open what we call the Row Evolution report.
This report contains a graph of the last 30 days (or weeks or months etc.), below the graph you will find the main metrics: visits, page views, conversions, etc. along with a sparkline and a % change over the period.
It is easy to change the metric being plotted so you can easily visualize the number of visits over the last 30 weeks of a particular search engine keyword. Still you are only one click away from plotting on the graph the number of conversions for this keyword.
New feature: Compare multiple rows together and get a graph and detailed analytics report
You can compare multiple rows together and see a graph! Click on SHIFT key, then click on the Chart icon that appears on the row when you hover over it. You can plot 2, 3, 4 or more rows on the same report that will be displayed in popover:
Matomo Mobile app devices:
Operating System marketshare:
Comparing entry visits on each subdomain:
Comparing demo languages used in the last months:
Comparing Custom variables values over time, Matomo mobile app versions
Browser marketshare historical report
Dashboard Mega Improvements & Custom Dashboards
You can now create Custom Dashboards! They will be added as a submenu, you can create unlimited dashboards?
It is also possible to set the default Widgets layout used for all newly created dashboard, the rename a dashboard, remove it (delete), or reset to the default widget selection & default layout.
Dashboard now automatically records & restore the full state of the widgets, including for example the columns you chose to plot on the graph.
Along with the ability to customize the columns layout (change to 4 columns, or one wide and 2 small for example), it makes it easy to create exactly the dashboard you need and reuse it over and over again, customizing it along the way.
Dashboard can now be embed via Iframe and token_auth and it works like a charm. We also added widgets for the Visitor Log and for the All Websites dashboard. Really quite a lot of users were eagerly waiting for these improvements making it trivial to export ANY Matomo report anywhere? as an Iframe or direct link!
New icon for Advanced Analytics Data Features 
This new UI element in the footer will contain data tools to help answer analytical questions:
Ability to Exclude rows with low visits has been moved to this new icon.
New feature: Ability to Flatten a report
The Flatten feature is also very useful to obtain a Flat Page URLs report, or to compare & visualize (with Row Evolution!) Custom Variables names and values. The feature is also available via the API &flat=1 parameter.
Feature Description: Several reports in Matomo can be organised in groups: Page URLs are grouped by directory name, Custom Variable values are grouped by name, a click on a Search Engine Keyword will display the list of search engines used.
It is sometimes useful to “flatten” the table so as to compare all elements together. For example, the Page URLs report by default looks like:
At the bottom of the table you will find the Configure icon. When hovered, it will look like this:
If you click on “Make it flat” the report will be flattened: all sub pages, for example all pages inside the directory /photos/ will be expanded and grouped into the Flat Page URLs report:
New report: Browser Marketshare
New Browser Marketshare report now reports without version names.
You can access the Browser by version report by clicking on the “Related report: Browser version” link below the report.
New report: Desktop VS Mobile
Desktop VS Mobile which replaces the previous “Dive type” report, now available with a click on the link “Related report: Type of screen”
New report: Entry Page Titles and Exit Page Titles
The reports Entry Page Titles and Exit Page Titles are finally available! You can access them from the “Related reports” link below “Exit Pages” report or below “Page Titles” report. The reports will contain data in the past as well, since the data was always processed but not displayed until now!
Freshness of reports now displayed in the inline help
All reports now display the how long ago they were generated, eg 24min 10s ago. When a report title is hovered, a Help icon appears 
which will display a short description of the current report and the “freshness” of the report.
New admin feature: Delete old Reports to keep dabatase size small
It is now possible to delete old reports! Ideal for Matomo users with a limited Mysql space, or simply to keep things under control.
You can select to delete daily, weekly, yearly data, and there is a cool database estimator size that refreshes in real time to tell you how much data will Matomo use after the changes.
Also check out the New advanced piwik database usage report, which helps understand how the database space is used, especially useful for large Matomo servers. See the report by enabling the DBStats plugin and clicking on the Database Usage tab.
New Privacy feature: DoNotTrack support enabled by default
When users click “Tell websites I do not want to be tracked” in their web browser, Matomo will listen and not track the user.
We are proud to support this privacy initiative. It is of course possible to disable the DoNotTrack support, in Settings > Privacy.
Note: DoNotTrack will not solve the (lack of) privacy online, it is however a small step towards a better world?
New Javascript function to disable all first party cookies from being read/set, existing cookies will be deleted. New function is: disableCookies()
This is particularly useful since the UK started requesting website owners to disclose the use of cookies, and make it easy to opt-out of all first party analytics cookies.
Log parsing with Matomo: many web hosts are already doing it
You most likely know (and probably use!) Log analyzers / Log parsing softwares such as AWStats, Webalizer, Urchin? ? You can now use Matomo to do the same, and do it better too.
For example, when importing log files Matomo reports search engine bots:
We have worked with dozens of beta testers, and already several web hosting companies are offering Matomo as a replacement of AWStats
Click for more info: how to import your server logs using Free Software, and benefiting from the Matomo user interface, widgets, APIs, email reports, and more.
If you are a webhost and wish to offer Matomo as a Log Analytics service, please get in touch!
Security review by SektionEins & Matomo as secure as ever
We have conducted a paid 5 days security audit of the Matomo source code with one of the best PHP Security company in the world, SektionEins. We take a proactive approach towards security, and it is our second review more than 1 year after the previous 5 days security review. The security review by Stefan Esser highlighted a limited XSS, Cookie DOS Vulnerability, Local File Inclusion Vulnerability.
We recommend SektionEins services for your Software or Application Security Reviews. They could find dozens of security issues in any random web application but could even find bugs in a top quality software already reviewed by dozens of researchers (learn more about security measures at Matomo)
Credits for the 1.8 release
Credits to the core Team and Partners for the bulk of the work, with some features developed by Matomo Professional Services who are doing a fantastic jobs helping customers worldwide use Matomo effectively!
Thank you to all translators for their ongoing work maintaining 46 translations. If you use Matomo in a different language and you see the translation can be improved, please consider help with translations.
Thank you for your support & help spreading the word about FREE Web Analytics where you stay in control!
PS: please leave comments with your feedback, suggestions or questions
