Choosing when to track an impression

One thing that is important to consider before setting up content tracking, is when you will track an impression. There are two methods for tracking content that you can choose between. Both methods will scan your page’s code in full to identify tracked content, but the impression is tracked at a different stage for each.

Whichever method you choose, it will typically apply to your entire site when applied to the default Matomo JavaScript tracker or the Matomo Tag Manager Variable.

Tracking All Content Impressions

This mode tracks every time the content is loaded within a page regardless of whether the Content Piece was seen or not. This configuration can be helpful to understand how many opportunities there were for somebody to have accessed a piece of content, whether they did or not.

Only Track Visible Content Impressions

The second method won’t track an impression until the content is actually displayed on the screen. For example, it will not track content that is below the fold (not visible without scrolling) or hidden behind interactive elements until a visitor has taken actions to show that content on their screen. This method is especially useful when you are focusing on the Interaction Rate as it can help you gauge how effective your content creative is. This is because a visitor has to see something before they can interact with it, so you get a more realistic picture of how effective the creative is at generating interactions.

Tracking Only Visible Content Impressions can also be useful for testing placements, e.g. to find out whether people actually see your footer ad spots, as you can compare the number of page loads against the number of people that have actually seen the content.