Get insights and improve your site with Events report

Once you’ve collected some Events on your site it is time to start the analysis. There are a few different ways you can do this. The first is taking a detailed look at each individual user’s path through your website using the Segmented Visit Log.

The Segmented Visit Log

This feature is useful for getting really granular detail about Event completions. For example, if you want people to leave a review about your site and you’ve set that up as an event. You can dig into individual users and see what they were doing before they left a review so you can place more focus on that.

To review the Segmented Visit Log head to the Events section of the Matomo interface and find the specific Event you are looking for. Hover over the event title and two icons should appear; the first is the Segmented Visit Log icon , which will allow you to view a Visit Log for every person that has completed the event in question.

Clicking this icon will open a popup that shows summary session logs for every person that has completed the event, as well as how many actions they took, and how long the visit was.

This kind of data can help you build a picture of what inspires conversions and can provide a base for pushing people through the process sooner. If you want to dig even deeper into a particular user you can click View visitor profile. Depending on your website configuration and data captured, this can even provide you with detail on the user’s previous sessions on the site.

Segmented event logs are especially valuable for analysing important events with low numbers of completions. You can really dig into each case to see how they got there and if there are any opportunities to improve the process. You can learn more about the User Profile here.

Row Evolution

The Row Evolution view is an alternative method of reviewing event data which is useful for analysing aggregated trends. This is a powerful feature when you do not want to dig into specific instances, and instead want a general feel for how a metric is evolving over time.

To get started with this feature, go to the main Events section in your dashboard. Within the Events table, hover your mouse over the row of the event you are interested in. You should now see the Row Evolution icon .

Click on the Row Evolution icon to load an evolution graph showing the number of event completions over time, broken down by the time period that is currently set in the Matomo dashboard.

A great example of when you might want to use this view is if you make a substantial change to the page where the event occurs. For example, a review submission – where you want to see whether your change on a certain date has led to more people submitting reviews in the following month.

You can also use this feature retrospectively when you notice a dip in event completions to see when the trend began, and attempt to deduce what might have caused it. If you use the Matomo Annotations feature in your analytics, which we recommend, they are shown in the comment bubbles below the graph and can often offer a clue for significant changes.

Alternative Event Visualisations

While it is important to understand the absolute number of times an event has occurred, it can be equally as important to understand the context around those visits. To do this, you can change the visualisation of event data within the Events section by looking for the second green icon (table icon by default) underneath the Events Table. By clicking it you will see all of the different visualisation options available, including one to Display a table with Visitor engagement metrics.

Display a table with Visitor engagement metrics

Selecting this option will add new columns for visit metrics in your events table. This can give you a quick understanding of how the number of event completions fits into the bigger picture. By default, you will see the number of visits leading to event completions. If you hover over this data you will also see this number as a percentage of total visits to your website.

This view also provides an Event Value column. The Event Value is the sum of all Event Values of each event type. Alongside this, you will also see an average, minimum and maximum Event Value column for more context.

Insights

Insights is another visualisation of event data that can be helpful for understanding trends on your site. Insights provides a quick and simple list of what’s changed in relation to how many people are completing events on your site month over month or year over year. Within the Insights visualisation, a table is shown summarising the percentage increase or decrease of all events on your site.

You can access the Insights visualisation by clicking the Insights icon (shown below).

Graph Displays

There are also several novel graphs that you can use to display event data which you may find useful. These are; Vertical bar graph and Piecharts which can be useful for analysing the event distribution, or Tag cloud to see your most popular events at a glance by the size of the text. In each of these views, if you hover over the titles, they will show you the number of event completions.