The numbers from Transitions don’t match other numbers shown in Matomo. Why?

The Transitions Plugin gives you a report that shows the things your visitors did directly before and after viewing a certain page. There are few cases, where the data displayed in Transitions is slightly off compared to what you might expect.

The number of pageviews shown in the pages report may not exactly match the number of pageviews in the Transitions report. There are several possible explanations:

• Since the pages report is pre-archived, it shows the numbers of time the archiving was launched. Transitions doesn’t use the archives but retrieves the number directly from the logs. So if you have more pageviews in Transitions and you are viewing a period that includes today, this might be why the numbers don’t match.
• The pages report sometimes aggregates multiple URLs into one row. For example when you track multiple domains, example1.org/home.html and example2.org/home.html will both end up in the row /home.html in the pages report. Transitions is based on unique URLs and will open on the URL with most pageviews that was aggregated into the row of the pages report. So if example1.org/home.html had more pageviews that example2.org/home.html, Transitions will open on the URL example1.org/home.html and show only statistics for this page.
• Before version 1.9, Matomo (Piwik) recorded URLs with the hash part (e.g. example.org/home.html#something) but didn’t show the hash part in the pages report. When you have tracked pages with different hash parts, the previous bullet point applies and you will see Transitions for the unique URL that had most pageviews of all the URLs aggregated into the row of the pages report you clicked on.

Another case of odd numbers is when the sum of the groups on the left does not equal the total number of pageviews. If you think that this is the case, first make sure that you have included the page reloads in your calculation. If the numbers still don’t match, read on.

This can happen when there were downloads or outlinks tracked directly before views of the page in the center. We could have added a group on the left “From Downloads” and “From Outlinks” but we decided not to, as it would make the interface more complex unnecessarily. Since we didn’t want to add the missing pageviews to any of the other numbers, the sum of all groups that are shown might differ from the total number of pageviews.

The main limitation of Transitions is that it only works on the period of time you still have the logs for. If you have set up Matomo to delete old logs, the pages report will still contain data from before because the reports were archived. Since Transitions reads its data directly from the logs it can only work if you still have the logs.

Another reason for an apparent case of incomplete data, is connected to the truncation of reports. Matomo doesn’t necessarily report every unique URL on your website, but instead there is a limit for the maximum number of rows in the pages report (which can be changed). Usually that’s not a problem because the number is high and if you haven’t heard about it yet, it probably doesn’t apply to you. But if this happens on your data, there might the case that for some days of a period, the page is listed under Others but not for other days. The report for the period is the sum of the daily reports and therefore it can happen, that a URL is “missing” on some days and not on others. The sum of the pageviews will be too low in the actions report but Transitions reports the number of pageviews correctly. It can do so because it doesn’t use the archives but the logs.

We hope you enjoy the Transitions feature. We appreciate if you let us know what you think about it!