How do segments work when segmenting on specific actions (pages or events) and how do I filter out any actions that don’t match?
When you create create Segments such as Visits where "Event action" is "News" (or for example Visits where "Custom dimension 'Page category'" is "News") and apply the segment to any report in Matomo, what will happen is that Matomo will select all visits that have at least any one action that matches the segment.
Matomo will select these visits and include all actions that these visits also did (all pageviews, events, etc.) even those that don’t match the segment (because segments are designed to filter out visits).
So when you apply this segment to your reports, the Matomo > Behavior reports will include events where ‘Event action’ is ‘Profile’ but also any other events from these visits such as ‘Sports’, ‘Technology’, ‘Ecology’, etc.
Create a Custom report to filter out the actions that don’t match
If you want to generate reports that only contain the particular “Events” and exclude other events, then you will need to create a Custom report in Matomo.
Using the example above, to be able to view any Matomo report for a particular “section”, when creating this custom report you would:
- select dimensions of “Event action”, and
- also define a “Filter” such as
Where "Event action" is "News".
Then when viewing this custom report, it will only show those actions that match the filter and therefore show events belonging to this particular section of your website.
Learn more about creating custom reports in the User guide.
You may also be interested in the FAQ: How do I measure and give people access to their reports for some page sections / categories / mini-sites / languages?