I am a bit shocked to find out that a segment like ‘Sessions in which Page “x” was viewed’ does not seem to be possible. (?)
Am I missing something? How can we work around this? This is very important for us and was a common use case in Google Analytics.
The use case:
There is a Page “Event xyz”
If somebody wants to apply for the event, he goes through the application form (on another page) and finally lands on a goal conversion page (=> goal “Application for Event xyz completed” is tracked).
Now we want to know how often people viewed that Event page and applied for the Event in one report, e.g. by Custom Channel Grouping. In GA, we would create the segment, and then go to the Channels Reports and add the goal conversions for that Event. This way, we knew that all sessions from these Channels had seen Event Page xyz.
In PiwikPro I can view Channel Groupings, but I can not isolate their traffic to such sources that also saw that Event Page if I also want to view the Goal Conversions in the same report.
Are there improvements planned to cover such cases? I would have never expected that PiwikPro would not cover this.
Hi. You can do it the other way around - create a segment meaning that a particular goal was converted within the session. Thanks to that you can see on one report all channels, page views on the event pages, as well as the conversions.
And yes, I agree that segmentation could be extended. The scenario that you mentioned works already like that for the Session log. It should be also possible to apply such segments to other reports.
Thanks, but if I create a segment with a certain goal conversion, I won’t get the traffic that just went to that page, but did NOT convert. So that is not going to cut it.
You see all unique visitors who visited certain pages and see which of them converted a specific goal. No segmentation or filtering is used in this case. We assume here that the goal is triggered on the same page URL.
That is better, but it shows the conversions for the pages where the conversions happened. In our case, those URLs are very different, so I get hundreds of rows with individual conversion URLs, and I don’t see traffic to the Event Page and Conversions in the same row, have to travel through many rows and add things up.
I don’t really want the URLs in there, just want the Sources / Channels / Campaigns, the total traffic by source and a certain Unique Goal Conversion Metric.
I will go with a compromise where Session Entry URL or Session Second URL = Event Page for now, but I really hope that Piwik Pro adds “had an Event for Page X/Custom Dimension Y in Session” to the segmentation engine.
Thanks nevertheless for your fast answers.
No, Piwik does not support creating behaviour based segments e.g. sessions where user visited page X or triggered event Y.
The workarounds I’ve found are:
Creating custom session dimensions for these key interactions. However this doesn’t really work that well because you quickly spam your custom dimensions, it doesn’t work retroactively, and it requires you to know what you want to segment on up front. I’ve done this for a couple of key interactions, but I’m not doing it for other use cases as I believe there’s a good chance Piwik will implement this in the future and I’d rather avoid the mess it creates.
The “User Funnel Report” and especially the “Funnel Report” has logic for segmenting sessions based on behaviour. In simple cases I’ve been able to see the amount of people who visited a page, and then triggered an event (not a goal). If you want to break this down by multiple dimensions this quickly gets unruly though, so it only works for the simplest of cases and is pretty tiresome.
In me and my agencies opinion this is the biggest shortcoming of Piwik compared to Google Analytics UA and we do feel a bit crippled. But Piwik is a great tool, don’t get me wrong
Here’s a set of other threads requesting the same thing.
Thanks. I also thought about this, but we already have almost 40 Goals for all those different Event Application Goals, and currently it is already a pain to manage those within the org. Adding more for the different Event pages (which furthermore change over time) will not be manageable.
Is there an update on the roadmap? Building segments based on events etc is a very important topic. Like @loldenburg I am shocked Piwik is not able to give us this feature.
At the moment I can say it’s one of the top candidates for the roadmap. We see that’s one of the biggest pain points for our users and for sure we don’t want to ignore that.
Any update on this on the roadmap?
As been said: I.e. "I want all users who viewed site X AND who fired event Y (on page Z) WITHIN the same (it would be great if one could choose this:) session or user or pageview.
We are focused on delivering new features, such as bot/fraud detection and the AI Agent, which leaves us little room for improvements like that one.
I understand it may seem like we are investing in new developments while neglecting our foundations. However, we are considering many factors as we shape the roadmap, and segment improvements will need to wait a bit longer.
I still stand by this being the biggest wart in Piwik Pro. The amount of work this has created for us is in the hundreds of hours over the last couple of years and a lot of questions are just going unanswered because it’s more effort than it’s worth dipping into SQL and doing a manual analysis. Sad to hear that it’s not being prioritised. Major mistake in my opinion. This is often end-user facing when I tell a user that no, we don’t know how many people did X after they saw the new landing page or any type of basic question people naturally ask about website usage. I literally have to explain that Piwik Pro is not a particularly good tool for analysis and there’s swathes of basic questions that cannot be answered. Considering how long it’s been this way we’ve practically given up on this being implemented and have been developing workarounds and moving more workloads towards our data warehouse. Piwik is increasingly functioning as a somewhat impractical data collector feeding into dashboards and other tools nowadays. The core use case we chose Piwik for - ad-hoc data exploration for less technical analysts - is a lot less compelling without segments.
Especially considering that practically everyone I’ve introduced Piwik to has stepped into the footgun of segmenting on event-scoped dimensions while expecting a session-scoped filtering and being served pretty much arbitrary data.
Thank you, Alex, for sharing your feedback and insights. I really appreciate your perspective and the considerable effort you’ve put into describing the real-world impact of this limitation. While I can’t make any commitments at this stage - as it’s truly a complex topic - I want to assure you that we’re at least about to start exploring it soon.
This exactly. I feel the foundation of Piwik / Matomo shining through in the limits of the scope with segments. Ultimately, if this is not fixed this will be the reason your tool will not be good enough and abandoned. The analytics one can use today with current limitations is just too serious and too far removed from event driven analytics. You really need to strive to get closer to GA/GA4 functionality when it comes to more advanced segments - just using funnels is not good enough. Too much gets locked away behind time expensive raw data/api/sql operations.
Fully agree. I’m ready to hop. If we’re just using Piwik as a collector better and cheaper options exist right now.
I agree but I want to add a precision from my side which you may or may not agree with. Event-driven analytics platforms are often too generic and require a lot of customization. Getting a reasonable UI for analysing websites requires little configuration with web analytics tools like Matomo/Piwik/UA. Most businesses don’t have apps, and most businesses don’t rely on analyzing deep engagement patterns like SaaS.
The generification that analytics tools need to go through to support both web analytics and product analytics makes them hard to use for non-technical users. The magic of UA is that people could generally teach themselves it. It’s intuitive. The data model matches their mental model or guides them towards a useful one. It leads people into analysing what matters most: Channels, Pages, Goals, Events and the few useful dimensions provided by the device like Geography. Product analytics tools often don’t do this well out of the box because it has to be generic enough to support applications as well. One of the many criticl usability flaws of GA4 really.
Piwik shouldn’t be a product analytics tool. But you shouldn’t need product analytics tools to compare conversion rates of a user who engaged with the quote calculator compared to those who didn’t. This is table stakes which is not covered by any reasonably priced modern web analytics tools. There’s a gaping hole in the market right now. I would have swapped yesterday if someone else filled that hole.
Throw in some basic retention analysis visualizations that plays well with these segments and you’ve got an absolute banger of a product where I could live with the not so great ingestion DX compared to event-based tools.
