The Visitor Profile

Visitors

The Visitor Profile helps you to understand your visitors’ individual behavior by summarizing and listing your visitors’ visits. Using the information displayed on the Visitor Profile, you’ll be able to better understand:

  • why your visitors viewed your website.
  • why your returning visitors continue to view your website.
  • what specific visitors are looking for and whether they found it on your website.

Launching the Visitor Profile

The Visitor Profile can be accessed through the Visits Log (the Visits Log can be accessed by navigating to Visitors > Visits Log). When you hover over a visit a link will be displayed:

visitor_profile_launch

Clicking this link will launch the visitor profile for the visit’s visitor.

Visitor Profile report

The next image is an example of the Visitor Profile for a real visitor who visited Matomo.org from Germany. He first visited Matomo.org 343 days ago by searching “piwik” on Google. As shown in the report, the visitor spent a total of 12 min 41s on the website, and viewed 26 pages in 4 visits. He converted 4 Goals (Downloaded Matomo four times). The page speed report shows each page took on average 0.24s to load for this visitor.

Visitor Profile

Feature Overview

Most recent visit overview

visitor_profile_single_visit_summary

In the upper left corner of the popup the details of the latest visit are displayed. The information displayed on the left includes the latest visit’s:

  • IP address,
  • visitor ID,
  • browser,
  • and screen resolution.

The visitor’s provider name is displayed as a tooltip when hovering over the IP address:

visitor_profile_provider_tooltip

The visit’s installed plugins are displayed as a tooltip when hovering over the browser:

visitor_profile_browser_plugins_tooltip

On the right, the latest visit’s custom variables are displayed:

visitor_profile_custom_variables

Though this section will initially show the details of the most recent visit, it can also display the details of other visits. Read about the visit list to learn more.

Visitor visit summary

Below the most recent visit details section, is a summary of the visitor’s behavior on your website:

visitor_profile_visits_summary

This summary is aggregated using at most the last 100 visits of a visitor’s visits. It displays:

  • the total amount of time the visitor spent on your website,
  • the total number of page views and visits,
  • the total conversions and the total conversions for each goal,
  • the total amount of money the visitor spent on your site,
  • the total amount of merchandise the visitor abandoned in his cart on your site,
  • the internal search keywords used by the visitor,
  • and the average amount of time it took your servers to generate a page for the visitor.

You can see how many times the visitor searched for a search term by hovering over it:

visitor_profile_search_count_tooltip

First and last visits

Below the summary is the description of the visitor’s first and last visit:

visitor_profile_first_last_visits

The summary contains the date of the visits, along with a summary of each visit’s referrer (if any). If the visitor came from a search engine and the keywords are known, they will be displayed as well.

Note: If there are more than 100 visits for a visitor, then the ‘First visit’ will not refer to the actual first visit, but the 100th oldest visit.

Visitor locations

The last section on the left displays the locations from which the visitor visited your website:

visitor_profile_visitor_location

To see this visitor’s visits on a map, click the show map link:

visitor_profile_visitor_location_with_map

This map functions similarly to the Real Time Map.

Visitor visit list

On the right side of the visitor profile you can examine each of the visitor’s visits:

visitor_profile_visits_list

Initially, the last 10 of the visitor’s visits are displayed. To load more visits, click the link at the bottom of the popup:

visitor_profile_load_more_visits

There is no limit to the number of visits that you can load.

If you want to view the details of an individual visit (for example, to see what browser was used), click on the visit header:

visitor_profile_visit_header_hover

The details of that visit will appear in the top left section of the popup:

visitor_profile_individual_visit_clicked

Advanced Uses

Exporting visitor profile data

The data displayed on the visitor profile can be exported to other formats, such as XML, JSON, CSV, etc. To export this data, first open the visitor profile for a visitor. Then hover over the visitor ID and click the export link that appears:

visitor_profile_export_link

This will show you the data in XML format. If you’d like to change the format, locate the format=xml part of the URL and change it to the format you’re looking for (for example, format=csv).

Visitor navigation

You can also navigate within the visitor profile popup to older or more recent visitors. When you hover over the top left section of the popup, two arrows will appear:

visitor_profile_nav_links

Clicking on the left and right arrows will change the visitor to the next more recent/less recent visitor, respectively.

You can also press the ‘left’ and ‘right’ arrow keys to change the visitor.

Visitor Profile dashboard widget

The visitor profile can be embedded as a dashboard widget:

visitor_profile_widget

Embed it by selecting Visitor profile under Live! in the widgets menu.

Embedding the Visitor Profile outside of Matomo

You can also use the Widgetize plugin to embed the Visitor Profile outside of Matomo. In order to do this, you need to generate a Widgetize link, and then point an iframe to it. The quickest way to get this link would be to open the visitor profile for a visitor, then click on the visitor ID:

visitor_profile_widgetize_tooltip

This will open a new window/tab with the visitor profile alone. The URL for this new page can be used to embed the Visitor Profile for that specific visitor.

Developer API

Plugin developers can use this API to enhance the visitor profile.

Access Visitor Profile data via Web API

Live.getVisitorProfile – This API method will return all the data used to create this Visitor Profile.

Extend the Visitor Profile by building a Plugin

Live.getExtraVisitorDetails – This event allows other plugins to add, remove or modify the information used in the Visitor Profile. Learn more here.

About Visitors’ Privacy

The Visitor IP (visitIp field) and the Unique Visitor ID (visitorId field) will be displayed in the user interface and returned in the API output only if you are logged in Matomo. For privacy reasons, we do not display the IP or Visitor ID to anonymous users.

Summary

The Visitor Profile is a powerful and innovative feature in Matomo that lets you see the detailed view of a particular visitor. We hope you enjoy this unique report and that it helps you improve user experience on your website or app!

Matomo training videos

Want to learn how to use Matomo’s other features? Watch these free training videos below!