How do I delete rows of a report and specific visits to clean-up some of the reporting data?

Sometimes you may see unwanted data in your Matomo reports. For example, you may see some unwanted or incorrectly named events in Behaviour > Events. Or, in Acquisition > Campaigns, you may see campaigns that are not real campaigns or were incorrectly named. If this occurs and you want to clean up the data, you can delete affected rows from your reports by removing the visits that generated these data points.

Before deleting any specific part of a report, consider if the report includes personal data. If it does, make sure that the deletion is consistent with your company’s data retention and deletion policies and privacy compliance obligations. You may be required to justify the reason for the deletion and keep a record of the deletion (without personal data) for audit purposes.

To delete specific parts of a report, or specific visits, follow the steps below:

  1. Login to Matomo as a Superuser.
  2. Click on Matomo settings Settings Cog Icon on the top right of the dashboard.
  3. Navigate to Privacy > GDPR Tools.
  4. Select a website from the dropdown – where you want to delete the data from.
  5. Choose the appropriate condition under Find data subjects by. For example, if you want to delete incorrect rows from your reports in Acquisition > Campaigns, select Campaign > Name is « THE-INCORRECT-CAMPAIGN-NAME »
  6. Click on Find Matching Data.
  7. Select the rows you want to delete and click on Delete Selected Visits.

Once you have deleted the visits which led to the incorrect data in your reports, Matomo will automatically re-process the historical data reports within a few hours. After the re-processing is complete, the reports will not show the incorrect data anymore.

Note: This works only when you still have access to the RAW visits details for the time period that you want to correct data for (i.e. when you haven’t yet deleted old tracking data).

Another alternative to remove rows from a report is to search within the reports using the search field (FAQ).