Why some pages or actions show a lower pageviews metric, but for a longer time period?

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.

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  

An example of where this may become an issue is if you have a page which is seasonal, visitors view it more in Summer than any other period of the year. The pageviews for the summer period will be high as that page is within the threshold of rows for that season. Across the year however that page is outside of the threshold so it’s results are added to the “Others” row in the yearly report.

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.