We are very excited to announce the immediate availability of Matomo (Piwik) 1.9.
- Download link
- How to update Matomo?
- List of all tickets closed: Changelog
Matomo 1.9 is a major release with some amazing new features, features that have been requested for a long time, including:
- The ability to see exactly how visitors come to, traverse and exit your websites pages with the new Transitions plugin.
- The ability to track how visitors use your website’s internal search mechanism with the new Site Search functionality.
- The ability to see what regions and cities your website visitors come from, as well as more accurate country tracking with the new GeoIP integration.
In addition to these new game changing features, there is another smaller new feature and 12 bug fixes.
New Feature – Transitions
This powerful, much desired new feature shows you how visitors come to each of your website’s pages and how they leave. Through the clear and simple visualization, you’ll be able to see:
- What search engine keywords lead to each of your website’s pages.
- Which websites refer visitors to which of your website’s pages.
- On what pages your visitors exited your website and whether they clicked an outlink to do so.
- What pages a visitor viewed before and after viewing a specific page.
- What Internal Site Search keywords were searched in your website, before and after the page (new feature! see below)
- How many times a page was reloaded (in total).
For more information on this amazing new feature, click here: Transitions / Click Path Analytics Documentation!
Note that the reports are generated on the fly, and should be very fast. In our tests on pages with 100,000+ pageviews, it loaded in less than 5 seconds. You do not want to see the SQL query behind the magic… it’s so complicated it’s beautiful :-)
To open the Transitions report for any page on your site, hover the mouse on the page, you will see two icons. The first one is for “Transitions” and the second one for “Row Evolution“:
Click here to see a demo of Transitions.
New Feature – Site Search
Site Search, yet another much desired new feature, will allow you to use Matomo to track how people use your website’s internal search. You can now see:
- What search keywords visitors used on your website’s internal search.
- Which of those keywords resulted in no results (and thus what content your visitors are looking for but cannot find).
- What pages visitors visited immediately after a search.
- What search categories visitors use (if your website employs search categories).
The Visitor Log & Real Time widgets will show the Searches done for each visitor:
The Visitors > Overview report will also show the number of searches and unique keywords:
To get started with Site Search tracking, go to Settings > Websites. You will be able to speciy for each website, whether Site Search is enabled or not. By default, all websites already created before the upgrade to Matomo 1.9 will have Site Search enabled. Here is what the admin UI looks like for a particular website:
If you use the analytics API, you might benefit from the new segment called “searches” that lets you select, visitors who initiated a search on your website. For example to select all visitors who made more than 5 searches on your site you would add to the page URL:
&segment=searches>5
These new reports work in Matomo Mobile App (have you tried our awesome mobile app yet?), and these can also be added to the HTML/PDF Email reports.
Learn more about Site Search Analytics in the documentation.
New Feature – GeoIP
And the last of the three new big features: we’ve finally integrated GeoIP with Matomo. You will now be able to see country reports that are far more accurate, as well as two new reports that show your visitors’ regions and cities.
With these reports come three new segments to use with the Analytics API:
- One for cities, e.g. city=London;country=gb which will show data for visits in London.
- One for regions, e.g. region=A8;country=fr which will show data for visits within Ile-de-France, France.
- And two more for latitude & longitude which can be used to perform bounding box queries, e.g. lat>49;lat<50;long>101;long<102
- Note: the region codes, city codes, can be found in the API output for the new UserCountry.getCity and UserCountry.getRegion analytics apis.
To get started using GeoIP, go to the new Geolocation admin tab and follow the instructions to set it up. The only thing you’ll need to do to get up and running, is download and install a GeoIP database from MaxMind.
More resources on setting up GeoIP:
- How do I get the GeoIP databases to improve accuracy of Country detection, and detect visitors’ Cities and Regions?
- How do I install the GeoIP PECL extension?
- How do I install the GeoIP module for Apache?
- How do I install the GeoIP module for Nginx?
- How do I apply accurate geolocation to old visits, after updating to Matomo 1.9?
Other New Features
We’ve also made it possible to specify different range sizes when viewing evolution graphs. You can now view visits for more than just 30 days/weeks/etc. in the past.
The static graphs have also be improved, with many small tweaks. See the previous release blog post to learn how you can get these nice graphs in your email reports.
What we’re working on
We are working to provide an open source analytics alternative to track your visitors, respect their privacy, and own your own data. We’re currently focused on…
- Improving the map widget
Now that we can tell what cities and regions your visitors are from, we want to do more than just list them. We’re going to improve the map widget and show you this data in another way. You’ll be able to more easily:- notice where your highest bounce counts are coming from
- compare metrics for different places that are located near each other
- notice whether your visitors are clustered together or are far apart
- View the repartition by Cities, by Regions, or by Country
- … and more!
Also, because we believe in Free Software that respects your freedom, we have worked with Gregor a great developer from Germany, to implement these maps in fully open source technologies SVG (click to view our work in progress ticket). Starting next version, if all goes well, Matomo should use 100% Free and open technologies (Bye Bye Flash!).
- Creating an auto-updater and auto-installer for GeoIP
GeoIP databases need to be updated every month. We want this to be as painless as possible for you, so we’ll be releasing a tool that will do it for you. This will, incidentally, be in time for your first update. - Bug fixes
With our focus on important new features, we didn’t have time to fix as many bugs as in our past releases. We’ll be re-focusing on squashing as many of these guys as we can for our next release.
Participate in Matomo!
Are you a talented developer, or an amazing User Interface designer, or do you like writing documentation, or are a marketing guru?
If you have some free time, if you are a do-er and not a talker ;-) and if you want to contribute to one of the most awesome open source projects, please get in touch with the Matomo team, or read this page to learn more.
Summary
For the full list of changes in Matomo 1.9 check out the Changelog.
Thank you to the core developers, all the beta testers and users, our official supporters, the translators & everyone who reported bugs or feature requests.
Stay tuned, we’ll have many new changes to show you in our next release. And please consider supporting or even participating in the project ? and if you like what you read, please tell your friends and colleagues, write on your website, blog…
Happy Analytics using Matomo 1.9!
