Row Evolution – View and compare historical data

The powerful Row Evolution feature shows you the current & past metric data for any row in any report. You can view how metrics for visits that use firefox or visits that came from Google or almost anything else change over time. Additionally, you can compare these trends with the trends behind other rows to gain even more insights (e.g. comparing the use of two different keywords over time).

This feature can be used to:

• See how keyword use changes over time, either due to changes in SEO or lack of searches (by viewing the evolution of visits from a specific keyword).
• See if more and more people are visiting your website on a mobile device (by viewing the evolution of visits of a row in the Mobile vs. Desktop report).
• See if your copy is losing its effectiveness over time (by viewing the evolution of revenue for a page).
• See if your visitors visit some pages more on certain months (by viewing the row evolution of a page while viewing metrics for a month).Row evolution can show you trends within reports not just with regard to a couple metrics, and is thus unique within all of Matomo (Piwik). Only through this feature can you see how visits to specific pages change over time or how visits with a specific browser change over time.

You can use row evolution to gain a nuanced understanding of how your web traffic changes and will change, and with the combination of another powerful feature, Annotations, you can record these insights for later recollection.

Accessing the Row Evolution Report

You can access the row evolution report in any report that shows you a table. You can tell if a report is available as a table if the following icon is present:

Clicking that icon will show the report as a table.

To show the evolution of a single row, hover your mouse over the row in question and click the following icon:

A popup with the row evolution report for that row will be displayed.

Navigating the Row Evolution Report

When you open the row evolution of a single row, the evolution of visits will be shown. To see the evolution of another metric, click the metric’s name:

To compare the trends between different metrics, shift+click several metrics:

Finally, note that you can see the numerical evolution value and direction of all main metrics:

Comparing multiple row evolutions

To compare evolution data for different rows, first open row evolution for one row, then at the bottom of the popup, click Pick a row to compare:

The popup will close and you will now be able to pick another row to compare with. To pick a row, click the row evolution icon on the other row:

The new popup will display row evolution for both rows using the ‘visits’ metric by default:

You can switch metrics by selecting another metric in the select box at the bottom of the page:

Recording your insights

If you gain any important insights from viewing row evolution data, you can record them using another feature of Matomo, Annotations. Click here to read more..