Analyse pages by Page Title and Page URL

Matomo provides two ways to analyse pageviews: the Pages report and the Page Titles report. Each report groups pageviews differently, which may display differences in pageview totals.

Pages report (analyse by URL)

The Pages report identifies pages by their full URL. Each unique URL is counted separately and represent two distinct pages in the Pages report, even if they display similar content such as paginated product listings.

The Pages report is useful when you want to analyse traffic to specific URLs or understand how visitors navigate between individual pages on your site.

Page Titles report (analyse by page title)

The Page Titles report groups pages based on the content inside the <title></title> HTML tag. This tag typically contains a short description of the page content and is often automatically generated by your content management system.

Unlike the Pages report, the Page Titles report aggregates pageviews when multiple URLs share the same title. For example, if both URLs (/products/ and /products/2/) use the page title “Products”, their pageviews will appear together under that title. Because of this grouping, pageview counts may differ between the Pages report and the Page Titles report. The behaviour is expected.

In some cases, analysing pages by title provides clearer insights than analysing by URL. For example, paginated pages often share the same title. Instead of analysing each numbered page individually, you may want to understand how often visitors view the overall section of the site.

The Page Titles report is useful for technical or non-descriptive URLs. Even if the second URL is difficult to interpret, the page title can clearly describe the page content:

• https://example.com/products-homeoffice/
• https://example.com/983475983536/

Another example is when a site automatically translates the content of a specific page on the same URL (or when visitors use the “Translate this page” feature within their browser). In this case, reviewing the Page Titles report instead of the Pages report will give you an indication that the page was viewed in an alternative language.

Identify URLs that share the same page title

If you want to investigate why pageviews are grouped under a single title, you can identify which URLs use that title.

1. Create a Custom Report with two dimensions: Page URL and Page Title.
2. Apply a filter for the specific Page Title you want to investigate.
3. The report will then list all URLs that use the title “Products”, for example: /products/, /products/2/, /products/3/

This allows you to see all URLs that share the same title and understand how their pageviews contribute to the aggregated total shown in the Page Titles report.