Create and analyse custom reports

Managing Custom Reports

To get to the “Manage Custom Reports” screen, click either in the reporting or in the administration menu on “Custom Reports” and then “Manage”. No developer knowledge is needed to create a new report, but you need to be logged in with at least ‘Write’ or ‘Admin’ access. When you manage your custom reports, the UI always explains what each step is about in detail and it will literally take you only seconds to configure reports.

Creating and editing a Custom Report

To create a new report, click on “Create new report” in the bottom left. To edit a report, simply click on the “edit” icon next to the name of a previously created report.

When you create a new report, the first thing you need to do is to define a name and optionally a description. The name of the report should describe the report in a short name as good as possible. Depending on your further configuration, the report name will be also used in the reporting menu.

Next you need to define which content you want to see in the report. For this you first select the visualization for this report (for example a table view or an evolution over time graph), and then the dimensions and metrics you want to see for this report. The table visualization will also let you view the report as a bar graph, pie chart, and cloud chart.

Did you know? A user with Super User access can make a report available for all websites with just one click. This way you don’t have to re-create each report for every website.

Report content

Dimensions typically describe characteristics and are usually shown in the first column of a report. You can select up to three dimensions, for example Browser, Country, City. Metrics on the other side are quantitative measurements. For example, if you want to increase the traffic on your website, include “Visits”, if you are improving the performance of your website, include “Avg. Generation Time”.

Report filter

Additionally, you can choose to define a filter so this report will show the results only for a subset of your visitors. For example, you can filter a report down by mobile device users only. If you are already familiar with the segment editor, this will be a straight forward for you.

Report page

By default, the created report will be visible under the “Custom Reports” category in the reporting menu and a new page for this report will be automatically generated. If you feel like the report you created is better placed under an existing category such as “Visitors”, or want to put the report on an existing reporting page in Matomo (Piwik), you can do this by choosing the relevant category.

Testing a report configuration

When you create a report and are not sure if the report content configuration gives you the results you are looking for, simply click on the “Preview report” button before creating the report. This lets you quickly verify your configuration and saves you from having to go back to the report configuration later.

Please note that if you have browser archiving disabled, the report may take up to an hour to become available. The just mentioned report preview will still work though, even if browser archiving is disabled.

Viewing Custom Reports

You can view custom reports just like any report in Matomo. They even support all the standard features like “Row Evolution”, “Segmented Visits Log”, “Pivoting”, and much more. You can also add any custom report to your dashboard and include them in your scheduled reports.

By default, you find a custom report under the “Custom Reports” category in the reporting menu. When configuring a custom report, you can also choose to show a report under any other existing reporting category or even add a report to any existing reporting page. If you for example choose to create a new custom report that shows more insights about Countries, you may want to add the report to the “Visitors => Locations” page to view all the location reports at a glance in just one place.

Examples of custom reports

Performance of pages broken down by minute.

Want to see how the page generation time various broken down per minute instead of only getting a daily average? Custom reports lets you view any dimension and metrics broken down by hour or even down by minute.

Events over 3 dimensions

Matomo currently lets you only view two combinations of Event Category, Event Name, and Event Action. With Custom Reports you can choose to link all three dimensions to view for example event actions by event name by event category.

Revenue per country filtered by mobile devices

Wondering which countries contribute the most revenue when you only look at mobile devices?

Page URLs by User

Another useful report can be to break down any dimension by users. For example, you could analyze which pages each user has viewed:

There are literally millions of combinations possible and only the sky is the limit.

Reporting features

Custom reports supports common Matomo reporting features such as

Flattening

Pivoting

Different visualizations

Adding a custom report widget to the dashboard

Your custom report tables and/or custom historical graphs can be added to your dashboard as widgets. Learn more how to add custom report widget to your dashboard(s).

Sending custom reports by email

Custom reports can also be emailed on a schedule when you create Scheduled email reports.