Segments with "Sessions in which Page X was viewed" do not seem to be possible?

[loldenburg]

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.

[kuba]

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.

Example configuration:

And a report. You can use table filters to check data only for events that you’re interested in:

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.

[loldenburg]

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.

[kuba]

Ok, so what about that?

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.

[loldenburg]

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.

[alexanderf]

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

Segments in interface and API

Hi! I would like to ask if there are plans to implement more advanced options to segments, the way they are in GA, as the current options are very limited. What I´m missing for example is: To be able to segment, for example, sessions where X event has occurred. Right now the segments really are just simple filters and also the scopes “cancel” each other as per this info from the website “If you request a query that includes at least one column which requires event scope, the entire query wi…

Filter Conversion Rate only when an event happened in the same session as the conversion

+1 for this feature request (mentioned above by Kuba) Additional annotation: It would be great within segment definition to define the scope of a segment: 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.

Event, Session, User segments

Piwik has weaker segmentation opportunities than GA UA. I think there are a couple of important ideas there that Piwik could take inspiration from.For instance, event, session, or user based segments. Currently when you segment by for instance a campaign, it will only include events from a session that included that campaign. However, often people don’t convert on the first visit. In this case being able to create a segment of users who at some point encountered that campaign can help understan…

Including a quote from Piwik

@Jarek

Nevertheless, there’s a chance that in the upcoming months, we will take on our plate some of those features, most likely sequence segments and filtering sessions by events.

[kuba]

One more idea for now using additional micro conversions:

You can also create goal conversion for page views on your event pages. Thanks to that, you should be able to create a funnel using a simple table:

Custom channel grouping | Page views | Visitors | goal conversion event xyz view | goal conversion event xyz filled form

This works obviously only assuming that there is a limited number of event pages you want to track.

Other than that thanks for the valuable feedback!

[loldenburg]

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.

[Martin]

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.

[Jarek]

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.

[Christin]

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.

[Christin]

Would be nice to get feedback on this.

[martho]

I’m missing this option too. Would love to have it implemented.

[Martin]

Good morning @Jarek its been nearly 2 years for this feature-request. how about an update for us?

[Jarek]

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.

[alexanderf]

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.