What is a ‘Hit’ in Matomo?

A hit is a single interaction sent to Matomo and processed for reporting or analysis. Hits include page views, events, downloads, outlinks, onsite searches, content tracking requests, and other supported tracking requests.

Not all hits represent human visits. Some interactions represent human behaviour, while others may come from automated systems such as AI Assistants. While AI tracking requests do not generate regular visits or actions and cannot be linked to visitor journeys, they are still recorded for analysis and billing purposes.

For Matomo Cloud, each AI Assistant (bot, agent) tracking request is processed as a hit and counts toward your Matomo Cloud quota in the same way as other tracked interactions.

Discover more key concepts in analytics.

What activities do not generate hits?

Certain types of activity do not generate hits because they do not send data to Matomo such as heartbeat timer requests used to measure time spent on page. Heartbeat requests update the last activity timestamp for a visit but do not appear in reports, do not generate hits or affect your Cloud quota.

Modifying the tracker to call events at intervals would generate hits, but this is not the standard behaviour of the heartbeat request.

How many page views is my website getting?

On average users track around 10-20% hits per page view. So if you track 100 page views, you would be tracking approx. 110 to 120 hits.

How many visits is my website is getting?

On average our users track around 3 hits per visit. So if you track 100 visits, you would be tracking approx. 300 hits. If you are using features like event tracking, then the number of hits will be typically higher.

Where can I view the Hits count in Matomo?

From Matomo 5.3.0, the All Websites Dashboard includes the Total Hits metric to quickly gauge the overall volume of interactions for your sites.

• Matomo Cloud users can view the total number of hits in Administration > Account > Billing, where it is displayed alongside your account quota.

• Hits can be included in Custom Reports using the Hits metric.

Using Google Analytics?

If you are using Google Analytics and interested in migrating to Matomo, you may want to know how many Hits per year are tracked in Google Analytics.