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Content Grouping, feature to categorise pages #4576

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mattab opened this issue Jan 26, 2014 · 17 comments
Open

Content Grouping, feature to categorise pages #4576

mattab opened this issue Jan 26, 2014 · 17 comments
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Enhancement For new feature suggestions that enhance Matomo's capabilities or add a new report, new API etc. Major Indicates the severity or impact or benefit of an issue is much higher than normal but not critical. RFC Indicates the issue is a request for comments where the author is looking for feedback.

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@mattab
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mattab commented Jan 26, 2014

Content Grouping is the ability to group pages into meaningful categories, and get analytics reports for these categories.

Currently it can be done with Piwik by using Custom Variables, where one can assign a page in one or several content categories or content tags. For more info about using Custom variables for content grouping see this blog post.

Groups could be assigned:

  • in the Javascript tracking code (similar to custom dimension action scope)
  • via an admin User interface letting user customize groups for each website (or across all websites). Groups are of two sorts:
    • Simple matches such as "page url contains X" or "page title contains Y" then group is Z
    • Regular expression matches on the URL or page Title, which can be used to extract the actual value to be used as Content group

There could also be heaps of small details that make groups valuables

  • could maybe replace custom dimensions of action scope?
  • Transitions for content groups
  • Users flow for content groups
  • New segments like "Entry page with Content group" and "Exit page with content group"
  • New reports like "Content Groups for entry pages", "Content groups for Exit pages"

More info about GA feature:

https://www.analyticspros.com/blog/google-analytics/content-grouping-intro-to-google-analytics-newest-feature/

@anonymous-matomo-user
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i like this idea of making an admin page to help define categories and sub categories base on url or page title, one additon i would add is allow people to regex the definition to allow more detailed categorization. Perhaps also allow people to define wordpress blog category abd sub category options.( since a large number of people use this as the cms). if we use that blog setup for definiton perhaps we also capture blog title as well as author.

@mattab mattab added this to the 2.x - The Great Piwik 2.x Backlog milestone Jul 8, 2014
@JMJHautier
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Hi !
Just to say that I would very much appreciate such 'grouping' feature within the User interface (as explained in this post). In my enterprise, only the IT department would have the rights to 'have fun' with the code and set up potential "custom variables" => As a programme assistant, as long as the function is not in the UI, I am powerless. And I doubt I am the only one in this situation :)

Sure, regex & subcategory options would be very nice, but a 'manual' selection ('simple matches' as mattab said ? ) would also do the trick.

Thanks for your attention !

@mattab mattab modified the milestones: Long term, Mid term Dec 5, 2016
@mattab
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mattab commented May 14, 2018

Such grouping feature would also be useful with the GDPR considerations #12600 . For example, it becomes quite important in some cases to "Anonymise" or "Pseudonymise" (#12836) the URLs, which may contain personal data. For example, in a WooCommerce store, URLs include the Order ID, which is personal data.

Using the Content Grouping feature, one could define basic rules to automatically track all pages under a directory eg. these pages/track/order/16645 and /track/order/111 would be grouped together under /track/order/order-id

-> This way, Page URLs would not anymore track personal data.

@tsteur
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tsteur commented May 14, 2018

I'm not quite sure I think content grouping would be a new report or would it replace rows within the Page URLs report?

I thought with content groups feature we would maybe still provide regular page URLs/page titles report.

But also additionally a similar report where some pages may be grouped into groups so you can see both the individual pages and the grouped pages. I think it is similar in GA where you can enable / disable content groups.

So we might actually need another feature which allows you the same behaviour as a content group kind of, but always rewrite the page URL or page title. Independent of whether content grouping is being viewed or not.

@matmerc
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matmerc commented Nov 23, 2018

has this been implemented at the end or is it still work in progress? thanks

@tsteur tsteur added the Major Indicates the severity or impact or benefit of an issue is much higher than normal but not critical. label Mar 25, 2019
@mattab mattab removed this from the Backlog (Help wanted) milestone Oct 21, 2019
@mattab mattab added this to the 4.0.0 milestone Nov 1, 2019
@mattab mattab added the RFC Indicates the issue is a request for comments where the author is looking for feedback. label Nov 1, 2019
@mattab mattab removed this from the 4.0.0 milestone Feb 16, 2020
@bmaehr
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bmaehr commented Apr 15, 2021

Is an important feature for us. Our use case: We have a start page and a login page.

Many of the graphs and statistics are not helpful, because most of the transitions, interactions and so on are between these two sites or it is not important to distinguished if the start is the starting page or the login page.

On the other hand it could be interesting how often the help page or leaving the page from login page or start page happens so in this case it would be interesting to treat them as separate pages.

Additionally we have DNS aliases from an older system to the website and there are additionally page visits with the old hostnames which again are treated as separate pages.

So a configurable grouping (perhaps even configurable for a diagram/stat) would be nice.

@TripleDotZero
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TripleDotZero commented Aug 20, 2021

I saw that this feature was removed from the 4.0.0 milestone. Also as of the time of writing this, this feature hasn't been added to any milestones. will this feature be worked on?

@tsteur
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tsteur commented Aug 22, 2021

@TripleDotZero right now we're not planning to work on it but it might change in a few months. I can only suggest to keep monitoring the issue unfortunately.

@dMores
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dMores commented Jun 20, 2023

Hey ... any updates on this feature?
I'm about to move over to matomo 100% and I'd like to be able to sort our traffic by groups of URLs since we have a complex setup where we use multiple custom post types to create one "channel" (and we have a number of "channels")

For example: Our magazine called "Mag" uses

  • domain/mag
  • domain/mag-article
  • domain/mag-edition

Any chance of this becoming doable in the back-end or do I need to set up a custom dimension?
Thanks!

@goochj03
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Have had another request asking if we provide a 'content grouping' feature similar to what is found in GA, this would be a nice addition. I've seen this accomplished by using custom dimensions but it's not the easiest of methods for someone to implement.

@dMores
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dMores commented Aug 23, 2023

Have had another request asking if we provide a 'content grouping' feature similar to what is found in GA, this would be a nice addition. I've seen this accomplished by using custom dimensions but it's not the easiest of methods for someone to implement.

We've added a custom dimension called "channel" and depending on the custom post type you're in (WordPress) this gets filled.

@goochj03
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Some more interest in seeing this feature added from another customer.
"Is there a way to customize the Pages report, for instance grouping "statistiques" and "informations" in the same."

@goochj03
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More interest from another customer to see this implemented into Matomo "We would like to see another layer of URL categorization which is linked to the broader website page categories such as "Login", "VOD" etc.

@mattab mattab added this to the Visionary Features Backlog milestone Dec 14, 2023
@AkshayRao27
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Yet another request for this feature - I don't want to sensationalise, but this is one of the few things that is keeping my workplace from completely ditching Google Analytics. Our content is available in 13 different languages and getting interlingual comparisons for each page / category is critical, as are numbers for each page / category with all languages combined.

Not having the option to set up Content Groups like Google Analytics means we need to run both Matomo & GA in parallel, and it's rather annoying. In fact, this was one of the first features I got asked about within a week of introducing my workplace to Matomo, and when people found out that it wasn't possible, it was decided that we will absolutely not be able to drop GA till this feature (among a few others) has been implemented.

@dMores
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dMores commented Dec 20, 2023

Yet another request for this feature - I don't want to sensationalise, but this is one of the few things that is keeping my workplace from completely ditching Google Analytics. Our content is available in 13 different languages and getting interlingual comparisons for each page / category is critical, as are numbers for each page / category with all languages combined.

We'll probably wait forever for this feature so it's easiest to talk to your programmer and have him send custom dimension values that you can then use in matomo to filter your traffic.
Now that we have set this up it's actually better than the system we had in GA.

@AkshayRao27
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We'll probably wait forever for this feature so it's easiest to talk to your programmer and have him send custom dimension values that you can then use in matomo to filter your traffic. Now that we have set this up it's actually better than the system we had in GA.

We don't currently have a programmer - I might have to do this myself. Would you happen to have any resources that I could use to learn how to do this? I am not sure where to start.

@dMores
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dMores commented Mar 12, 2024

I don't know what content management system you're using so it depends on how well you can code.
But basically you need to first set up a custom dimension:
https://matomo.org/faq/reporting-tools/create-track-and-manage-custom-dimensions/

Then you have to edit the matomo tracking code to send a value to this custom dimension like
_paq.push()['setCustomDimension', 1, 'dimensionvalue']);

We called our content group "content_group", and each page on our website sends the current group its in. Depending on your CMS this might be easy because you already have a variable that contains this value (in Wordpress: current custom post type), or if you have a webshop you could use the current product category
_paq.push()['setCustomDimension', 1, 'shoes']);
_paq.push()['setCustomDimension', 1, 'shirts']);
Then you'd try and finde the php file that outputs the current catgory and use that variable to fill in the dimension value.

hope that gets you started, without knowing more I can't help you more :-)

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Labels
Enhancement For new feature suggestions that enhance Matomo's capabilities or add a new report, new API etc. Major Indicates the severity or impact or benefit of an issue is much higher than normal but not critical. RFC Indicates the issue is a request for comments where the author is looking for feedback.
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