Finding and Reading Your Site's Traffic Analytics

Available on
Faculty Sites

Our platform collects traffic data for each website that you can review. Traffic analytics are vital to developing good content strategy by revealing how many views your website receives, which pages generate the most traffic, how many downloads are made, and more. This data is recorded in Matomo Analytics software, and can even be turned into regular reports that are automatically sent via email on a regular basis.

Getting access to your traffic analytics

To get access to your site's traffic analytics in Matomo, send an email requesting access to websupport@iastate.edu. After you request access, we will create a traffic segment for your site's data and email you back when you can access Matomo's analytics platform.

Finding your traffic data

Once you've received your email confirming access to your data, you can go to the Matomo login page. Use your Okta login credentials to log in and you will be taken to the Matomo Dashboard, like the one shown below.

Matomo dashboard screenshot

This page shows the traffic data for all Faculty sites. To see the data for your site, click the button at the top near the middle of the page that says All Visits. This will open a drop down menu like the one shown below:

Matomo segment menu

In the search bar, type your Net-ID and press enter. You should see your Net-ID appear under the words Shared with you. Click directly on your Net-ID and your Matomo Dashboard will re-load with data only from your own website.

Setting the date range

By default, Matomo will display traffic from the current day. You can change this by pressing the button at the top that displays today's current date:

date range selector screenshot in Matomo

You can use the controls on the right side to set your preferred date range. Once you've set these and pressed Apply, the data on the dashboard will be updated to show traffic from the selected date range.

Understanding your traffic data

The dashboard will show you most of the important metrics about your website: Visits Overview/Summary, Traffic by Page, Downloads, and Device type.

  • Visits Overview/Visits Summary will show you a variety of metrics for your entire site. If you're unsure of what any of the terms here mean, consult the Matomo glossary for more information.
  • Pages will show the traffic data for each individual page on your site.
  • Downloads will show you which files are being downloaded from your site and how many times.
  • Device type shows which sort of devices (Desktop, smartphone, etc.) are being used to access your site

While these sections will cover most needs, you are welcome to explore other sections of the Matomo platform. If you have any questions about interpreting this data, please reach out to websupport@iastate.edu.

Requesting a monthly/annual report

If you would like a report with some of this data emailed to you automatically, please email websupport@iastate.edu and let us know what data you need and how often you would like to receive in the report.

Get to know your dashboard in Getting More from your Website Analytics.

Not sure which data you need? Find a breakdown of available data and potential insights in Understanding Your New Monthly Analytics Report.