Why do URLs other than those in my segment appear in my reports?

Matomo segments are visit-based and they apply to entire visits rather than individual actions or pages. If a visit meets the segment’s conditions, all URLs visited during that visit will be included in the segment’s data. So, once a visit qualifies for a segment, all interactions within that visit are included in the data, even if some don’t directly match the segment’s conditions.

Below is an example of a segment with the condition “PageURL contains https://yourdomain.com/en/“.

If a visitor starts their visit at yourdomain.com/de and then navigates to yourdomain.com/en during the same visit, this visit will be included in the data for your yourdomain.com/en segment. Even though the visit started on a URL outside the segment, it’s included because the specified URL condition was met during the visit. As we can see in the Pages report below, pages for both yourdomain.com/en and yourdomain.com/de are included.

To specifically filter and display certain URLs, you can create a custom report. This way, the report will only show data for the URLs that match the conditions defined in your filter. Custom reports allow for a more tailored view of the data based on the criteria you have requested. The below example contains a filter “PageURL contains https://yourdomain.com/en/“.

Applying a filter to a custom report, will show data based only on the PageURL that has been specified, in this case yourdomain.com/en