Why are metrics different for the same page when comparing reports across time ranges?

You may have come across the scenario where a site you are monitoring has a higher number of actions in a month than what is displayed for the entire year for specific pages. This is likely due to the row limit when archiving, causing the page you’re checking to be added to the Others row.

When comparing reports (e.g., pageviews per month vs per year), the results may differ for longer time ranges due to the row limits. When the number of rows in a report exceeds the configured limit, less frequently viewed pages may be grouped under Others, especially in reports covering long time ranges.

This guide explains why reports for longer time ranges might show fewer individual entries or appear to have lower/higher metrics for specific pages. The data itself isn’t aggregated differently; it’s simply displayed in a way that optimises report performance.

What is the “Others” row?

The Others row consolidates entries that fall below a certain threshold when data is aggregated for longer time periods. By default, Matomo has a row limit of 500.

Example

The following scenario shows how this applies to a travel website with seasonal traffic fluctuations. In this example, the row limit is set to 10.

• If you analyse visits for January (EU winter), you will notice there are many pageviews for winter holiday articles, such as Top 10 Snow-Capped Destinations for Your Winter Getaway.

• However, when you extend the report to cover the entire year, winter-related articles may disappear from the main list, replaced by more popular summer travel content.

It does not mean the winter articles were never visited as the traffic was shown in January’s report. Instead, those articles moved to the Others row as they no longer rank within the threshold of displayed rows when data is aggregated across a full year.

If you looked at the Top 10 Snow-Capped Destinations for Your Winter Getaway on a weekly or daily basis, the sum of pageviews may be higher than 188 as the year report is a sum of the months. In some months, this page may not have ranked within the top 10 most-viewed pages.

When looking at a yearly report, only the most popular pages for the entire year are listed individually, while lower-ranking pages are grouped into the Others row. This means that in months where this page was outside the top 10, its pageviews would not contribute to the yearly report as an individual entry, even though they were counted in the monthly or daily reports.

How to extract data from the “Others” row?

To retrieve specific data that has been grouped under the Others row in Matomo, you can create a custom report with filtering rules. This approach allows you to isolate and analyse the information hidden within the Others row, by excluding or including specific URL patterns. Read more about extracting data using custom dimensions.

For example, you’ve identified many page URLs follow a pattern like /product-{id} in your Pages report. In a custom report, you can add a filter to exclude these URLs: Page URL does not contain https://mywebsite.com/product-

Page URLs initially grouped under Others that meet the condition will be isolated and displayed in your custom report.

By applying specific rules, you can gain full visibility into the data, even for URLs that are consolidated into the Others row.

Row limits in Matomo On-Premise and Matomo Cloud

In Matomo Cloud, the row limits are fixed and cannot be adjusted. This ensures the system remains optimised for performance and scalability.

For Matomo On-Premise, it is possible to adjust the row limits during archiving to include more rows in reports for longer time periods. However, increasing this limit may impact server performance, especially for large datasets.

To improve the performance of archiving the maximum rows are limited by default in the global config file, these are the default limits:

 ;during archiving, Matomo will limit the number of results recorded, for performance reasons
 ;maximum number of rows for any of the Referrers tables (keywords, search engines, campaigns, etc.)
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_referrers = 1000

 ;maximum number of rows for any of the Referrers subtable (search engines by keyword, keyword by campaign, etc.)
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_subtable_referrers = 50

 ;maximum number of rows for the Users report
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_userid_users = 50000

 ;maximum number of rows for the Custom Dimensions report
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_custom_dimensions = 1000

 ;maximum number of rows for the Custom Dimensions subtable reports
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_subtable_custom_dimensions = 1000

 ;maximum number of rows for any of the Actions tables (pages, downloads, outlinks)
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_actions = 500

 ;maximum number of rows for pages in categories (sub pages, when clicking on the + for a page category)
 ;note: should not exceed the display limit in Matomo\Actions\Controller::ACTIONS_REPORT_ROWS_DISPLAY
 ;because each subdirectory doesnt have paging at the bottom, so all data should be displayed if possible.
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_subtable_actions = 100

 ;maximum number of rows for the Site Search table
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_site_search = 500

 ;maximum number of rows for any of the Events tables (Categories, Actions, Names)
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_events = 500

 ;maximum number of rows for sub-tables of the Events tables (eg. for the subtables Categories>Actions or Categories>Names).
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_subtable_events = 500

 ;maximum number of rows for other tables (Providers, User settings configurations) 
 datatable_archiving_maximum_rows_standard = 500  

You can increase the maximum row limit in your config.ini.php using the instructions in our FAQ and then invalidate the reports and process them again for the missing data to be included.