Common Content Tracking use cases

There are many different scenarios where content tracking can be useful. In this section, we have shared some common use cases that you might want to consider for your site.

Advertising Banners

This is one of the most popular use cases for Content Tracking. When you are running banner ads on your site, you often get paid per impression or per click. This aligns well with the two metrics tracked against your content by this feature, which means you can use your Content Tracking data to get an idea of how effective your site is at generating ad revenue. Of course, not all banner ads follow a CPC model. You might feature affiliate marketing links, where you only get paid when a product is purchased. In this case, you’ll still want to track your content with Matomo so that you can optimise your Interaction Rate to generate as many tracked clicks as possible to partner websites.

On-Page Content such as reviews and related pages features

While it is extremely useful to know how many people have visited a page, it can be more beneficial to know which sections of a page people have seen displayed on the screen. If a page features a lot of content that requires scrolling, then a page view alone won’t tell you what a visitor saw. This is also true if sections of your content are hidden behind interactive elements such as an accordion or tabs. Implementing Content Tracking on any important content pieces is one way of establishing whether a user saw or interacted with that specific piece of content while they were on a page.

Single Page Websites

Another situation where tracking simple page content is useful is for single page websites where there is only one page which can be visited, but there are multiple sections within that page. This could be for design reasons, such as longer pages that require scrolling or technical reasons such as a CMS which dynamically loads sections on the same URL. In these cases, tracking visible content can help you understand which sections of your site the visitor saw.

Featured Content Elements

Sometimes you may feature blocks of content that contain multiple elements a user can interact with that all lead to the same target. In this case, it can be useful to define several tracked content pieces to identify which elements are most popular. For example, on the Matomo marketplace we ran an experiment to see whether people were more likely to click on the Title, Image or Button as shown in the image below.

Monitor Popup Effectiveness With Content Tracking

If your site features popup email subscription forms or promotions, you can use Content Tracking to monitor their effectiveness. Many popup scripts allow you to set timers and specific conditions that have to be met before a popup is loaded. This means that data on the number of impressions can be valuable for analysing how many people actually trigger the popup in the first place. Alongside this, you can configure tracking of the desired action, such as a link click or pressing a form button within the popup, to track the interaction rate of the creative. This can help you to ensure that your popups are being seen and effectively serving their purpose.