How do I create Custom Segments of Visitors and apply the segments to filter my report’s data?

Matomo lets you easily create advanced Custom Segments of Visitors. You can save Custom Segments to reuse them later. As well as being available from the User Interface, Custom Segments can also be applied via the Analytics API. Custom Segments can contain unlimited number of AND and OR clauses, using any combination of more than 40 available dimensions (visitor attributes).

Alternatively, you can create Custom Reports which lets you filter any custom report depending on your requirements. This way you can for example add several reports that target a specific audience next to each other and compare them much easier.

Note: you may also apply custom segments to Custom reports scheduled to be sent by sms text message and/or email reports as HTML or PDF. With Matomo (Piwik) you can scheduled reports on a custom segment of your audience, better analytics for your team members and clients.

Matomo On-Premise

Since Matomo 3.12.0 the segments behave no longer like a filter but instead include all data of visits that match a certain segment.

This means if you have a segment like Page Title Contains example, and you view a Page title report, then all pages with a title that contained example used to be shown (before Matomo 3.12.0). With this new behaviour (3.12.0 and newer), all page titles are now shown that were viewed by visitors who also viewed a page with the title example as part of their visit. This means it does not only show pages that contained the word example, but also all the other page titles that were viewed by these matching visits.

To restore the previous behaviour, you can edit your config/config.ini.php and add the following setting:

[General]
enable_segments_cache = 0

A better alternative is to instead create a Custom Report and use a “Filter” in the custom report. Learn more in this FAQ.