Transitions – Analyse the previous and following actions of your visitors for each page
Page Transitions show what visitors did immediately before and after viewing a specific page. You can use it to understand how visitors arrived on a page, which internal pages they navigated from, and what they did next.
For external traffic sources, Transitions focuses on visits that entered your site on the selected page. So, referrers shown in Transitions may differ from those in the standard Acquisition reports.
This guide explains how to access, interpret, and apply the insights from the Transitions report.
Open the Page Transitions report
Use Transitions when you want to investigate the activity immediately surrounding a particular page. You can launch the Transitions report from the Pages reports including Entry pages and Page titles.
- Open a report in Behaviour > Pages (or Entry pages or Page title).
- Hover over a row in the table and click the Transitions icon to open the report for that page.
- To view page transitions for top Page URLs and Page titles, go to Behaviour > Transitions.
- Use the Action Type dropdown at the top of Transitions to analyse pages by their URL or page title.
- Click a page listed under From Internal Pages or To Internal Pages to open Transitions for that page.
- Click the Export icon at the bottom of the Transitions report to export the data in JSON or XML format for the selected page.
Understanding the Page Transitions report
The selected page appears in the centre of the report. The number of pageviews for that specific page is displayed along with other statistics. You can click a group heading or its corresponding connection to expand or collapse the group.
The left side shows what visitors did immediately before viewing the selected page. The right side shows what they did immediately afterwards. The size of the connections is proportional to the amount of traffic following each route.
| Traffic type | Description |
|---|---|
| Incoming page traffic | |
| From Internal Pages | Visitors came to the selected page on your website via links or navigation. |
| From Search Engines |
Visitors came from external search engines directly to the selected page. Learn more about analysing search keywords. |
| From Websites | External website referrals for visits that entered your site on the selected page. Expand the group to see the referring websites. |
| From Campaigns | Campaign visits that entered your site on the selected page. This group only appears when visitors trigger a campaign when entering your site on the selected page. |
| From Internal Searches | Internal search terms that visitors used before navigating to the selected page. Learn more about Site Search analytics. |
| Direct Entries | Visits to your website that started on the selected page. |
| Outgoing page traffic | |
| To Internal Pages | Pages on your site that visitors viewed immediately after the selected page. |
| Internal Searches | Internal search terms that visitors started on the selected page. |
| Downloads | Downloads triggered from the selected page. |
| Outlinks | Links to external websites clicked from the selected page. |
| Exits | Visits that ended on the selected page, with no subsequent tracked action. |
| Page Reloads | The number of times the page was reloaded/refreshed. |
Transitions focuses on activity around an individual page rather than visualising an entire visitor journey. For a broader visual representation of common paths through your website or app, see Users Flow.
Data differences and performance
Page Transitions may show different pageview totals or referrer data compared with other Matomo reports. These differences can occur because Transitions retrieves data directly from logs, uses page-specific information, and groups lower-ranked results under Others.
For more information, see the following FAQs:
- The numbers from Transitions don’t match other numbers shown in Matomo. Why?
- Why are some referrers missing or grouped into Others in Page Transitions?
- How do I make Transitions work faster on high traffic websites? (On-Premise)
Matomo training videos
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