Analyse and compare the historical evolution of a row
Row Evolution graphs are especially useful for discovering trends in your metrics over different timeframes. If you notice significant directional shifts in your trend lines, you can investigate what may have caused them, whether good or bad.
This feature can be used to:
- See how keyword use changes over time, either due to changes in SEO or lack of searches (by viewing the evolution of visits from a specific keyword).
- See if more and more people are visiting your website on a mobile device (by viewing the evolution of visits of a row in the Mobile vs. Desktop report).
- See if your copy is losing its effectiveness over time (by viewing the evolution of revenue for a page).
- See if your visitors visit some pages more on certain months (by viewing the row evolution of a page while viewing metrics for a month).
Row evolution can show you trends within reports not just with regard to a couple metrics, and is thus unique within all of Matomo. Only through this feature can you see how visits to specific pages change over time or how visits with a specific browser change over time.
You can use row evolution to gain a nuanced understanding of how your web traffic changes and will change, and with the combination of another powerful feature, Annotations, you can record these insights for later recollection.
Navigating the Row Evolution Report
When you view the row evolution of a single data row, the evolution of visits will be shown. To see the evolution of another metric, click the metric’s name:
To compare the trends between different metrics, shift+click several metrics:
Finally, note that you can see the numerical evolution value and direction of all main metrics:
Comparing multiple row evolutions
To compare evolution data for different rows, first open row evolution for one row, then at the bottom of the popup, click Pick a row to compare:
The popup will close and you will now be able to pick another row to compare with. To pick a row, click the row evolution icon on the other row:
The new popup will display row evolution for both rows using the ‘visits’ metric by default:
You can switch metrics by selecting another metric in the select box at the bottom of the page:
Recording your insights
If you gain any important insights from viewing row evolution data, you can record them using another feature of Matomo (Piwik), Annotations. For example, if you notice that your conversion rates have suddenly shot upwards on a specific date and there is a note underneath that mentions a change in your website design on that same date, then you have a pretty good idea of what the change relates to. If the change is positive, you might then aim to replicate or emphasise the change if possible.
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Matomo training videos
Want to learn how to use Matomo’s other features? Watch these free training videos below!