How does Matomo track downloads?

On many websites, you want to track when visitors download your brochure, a photo, a software, etc. Matomo (Piwik) automatically track these clicks as Downloads, and reports them under Behavior > Downloads.

Matomo will automatically detect a download as a click on a link that ends with one of the following file extensions: 7z, aac, apk, arc, arj, asf, asx, avi, azw3, bin, bz, bz2, csv, deb, dmg, doc, docx, epub, exe, flv, gif, gz, gzip, hqx, ibooks, jar, jpg, jpeg, js, mp2, mp3, mp4, mpg, mpeg, mobi, mov, movie, msi, msp, odb, odf, odg, ods, odt, ogg, ogv, pdf, phps, png, ppt, pptx, qt, qtm, ra, ram, rar, rpm, sea, sit, tar, tbz, tbz2, tgz, torrent, txt, wav, wma, wmv, wpd, xls, xlsx, xml, z, zip.

You can also force Matomo to count a click as a download by using a specific CSS class for this link. Check out the section “Force a click on a link to be recorded as a download in Matomo” in the Javascript tagging Guide.

When you use the Log Importer, files with one of the file extensions listed above will be automatically tracked as downloads in Matomo.

To increase accuracy of download tracking, you can consider enabling the use of navigator.sendBeacon().

If you have problems tracking downloads, check this FAQ.