Manage Hits usage in Matomo

For high-traffic sites, hit usage can increase quickly within a single day. A regular review of your hit usage helps identify unexpected spikes before they become a problem.

• Check your Hits usage daily and compare it against your expected daily average.
• Investigate unexpected spikes that cannot be explained by known campaigns, scheduled imports, increased visitor activity, bot traffic, or recent tracking changes.
• Review whether pages intentionally track multiple visitor interactions, such as clicks, downloads, form submissions, or media playback.

Duplicate tags or scripts can send the same data multiple times.

• Check if multiple Matomo tracking codes are added to the same page.
• Determine if the same tag or event is firing more than once for a single interaction using the browser developer tools > Network tab.
• Review active tags in Matomo Tag Manager and configure fire limits where appropriate to reduce unnecessary tracking requests.
• Review your tracking setup for overlapping implementations using both JavaScript tracking and Tag Manager.

Employee activity and testing can consume unnecessary Hits. Exclude office IP addresses and prevent QA or staging activity from being tracked.

• Exclude employee office IP addresses and IP ranges from tracking.
• Check whether frequent testing on production sites is inflating hit counts.
• Configure QA and staging environments to send data to a test Matomo instance instead of the live site.

Custom events can increase hit usage quickly when they are overused or track interactions that provide little analytical value.

• Review high-volume events to confirm they support a business goal or reporting requirement.
• Remove or consolidate events that duplicate information already captured by page views or goals.
• Review whether interactions such as scroll tracking, mouse movements, or repeated button clicks generate more events than necessary.
• Disable test or debug events in production environments.

Features such as Heatmaps, Session Recordings, Crash Analytics, SPA tracking, and custom polling provide valuable insights. Configure them intentionally to collect the data you need while avoiding unnecessary tracking.

• Use the Heatmaps and Session Recordings sample rate to control what percentage of page views are tracked.
• Configure Heatmaps and Session Recordings to stop automatically after collecting enough data.
• Disable Heatmaps and Session Recordings that are no longer needed.
• If you use Crash Analytics, review recurring crashes and optimise your application to reduce unnecessary crash reports. Configure the threshold to control how much of your Cloud quota is allocated to crash tracking.
• Review automatically generated tracking to ensure data is collected only where it provides value.

Bot traffic can significantly inflate hits usage and costs. Bots count toward quota unless blocked before ingestion. Only pre-ingestion filtering reduces hits.

• Review traffic spikes from unknown referrers, user agents, or IP addresses.
• Identify traffic with unusually high activity and little or no meaningful engagement.
• Configure Tracking Spam Prevention, user agent exclusions, and IP exclusions to block unwanted traffic before it is tracked.
• Review the Visits Log regularly and add new exclusions as unwanted traffic patterns are identified.

Pre-ingestion filtering is the most effective way to reduce hit usage because unwanted requests are blocked before they reach Matomo.

• Review which requests should be excluded before tracking, such as bots, monitoring tools, health checks, and internal services.
• Block unwanted traffic before it reaches Matomo, as filtering reports afterwards does not reduce hit usage.
• Regularly review your filtering rules to ensure new unwanted traffic is excluded.

As a short-term measure, tracking can be temporarily disabled to immediately stop hit usage while you investigate unexpected traffic or tracking issues. Restore tracking once the underlying issue has been resolved.

• To temporarily stop tracking, use the self-service method below whenever possible.
• Disable tracking at the source using your existing tracking implementation.
• If you use Matomo Tag Manager, pause the tracking tags and republish the container.
• If you use the JavaScript tracker, temporarily remove or disable the tracking code before deploying your changes.
• If the issue is limited to specific traffic, exclude those tracking requests instead of disabling tracking across your entire site.

Configure alerts to detect unexpected increases in hit usage.

• Use Custom Alerts and Schedule Reports to notify key stakeholders by email, SMS, Slack, or Microsoft Teams when hit usage requires attention.
• Configure alerts at different usage thresholds to provide early warning and allow time to investigate.
• Review traffic, campaigns, and tracking changes when hit usage reaches 70–80% of your quota.
• Investigate sudden increases in hit usage before they reach critical levels.

Good governance helps prevent unexpected changes to tracking and hit usage.

• Review the Activity Log after unexpected changes in hit usage to identify recent configuration changes.
• Limit Admin and Superuser access to trusted users responsible for tracking configuration.
• Document your tracking implementation and change management process before deploying updates.

Considering upgrading your Matomo Cloud plan after optimising tracking and when hit usage reflects genuine business growth.

• Review monthly usage trends to distinguish temporary spikes from sustained growth.
• Confirm that unnecessary tracking has been removed before increasing your quota.
• Consider a higher plan when legitimate traffic growth or business requirements consistently exceed your quota.