[Video] Matomo Tag Manager from A to Z

TRANSCRIPT: Thank you, everyone, for attending this pre-MatomoCamp event. Over the next 60 minutes, including 45 minutes of presentation and 15 minutes of Q&A, I’ll be discussing Matomo Tag Manager. I’ll aim to cover as much as I can, which is why I’ve titled the session “Matomo Tag Manager from A to Z”.

I’m Ronan Chardonneau, a professional consultant and trainer for Matomo Analytics. Along with a few friends, I had the idea to organise MatomoCamp—an event where people from around the world present on Matomo. The official event is in 30 days. We’re hosting this pre-event to test our infrastructure, as we’re a new team with no predefined IT setup. Special thanks to Lukas Winkler and Valentin from Empreinte Digitale, who helped us prepare the servers and software.

If you have questions, feel free to contact us via the website matomocamp.org or use the live chat on live.matomocamp.org, where you’ll find the stream and a chat box at the bottom of the page.

Now, let’s dive into the topic. Matomo Tag Manager (MTM) is a tag management system. If you’re familiar with content management systems like WordPress or Drupal, you’ll understand the basic concept. But instead of managing blog posts or media, MTM manages tracking tags—snippets of code inserted into your website to send data to Matomo.

You may already be familiar with the default Matomo tracking code. It sends data such as page views, downloads, and outbound links. But often, that’s not enough. You might want to track scroll depth, video plays, mouse hovers, or custom interactions. That’s where Matomo Tag Manager becomes essential.

I’ll demonstrate this using a real example. We’ll look at how to implement a tag for scroll tracking. The process involves placing a container snippet (similar to the standard Matomo code) on every page of your site. This snippet connects to the MTM backend where you can configure tags and triggers.

Let’s say you want to track how far down a user scrolls on a page. You would:

• Create a tag using Matomo Analytics to send an “event”.
• Configure the event with a category (e.g. “interaction”), an action (e.g. “scroll”), and a dynamic name (e.g. scroll percentage).
• Set a trigger that fires the tag when a user scrolls down 50% of the page.

Once the tag and trigger are linked, you publish the container. From then on, Matomo will record scroll interactions as events.

Matomo Tag Manager offers advantages beyond flexibility. It improves project transparency by tracking who added what, enhances communication between marketing and IT, and reduces deployment dependency. It can also improve performance by controlling when and where scripts load.

You can also define more valuable actions as goals. For instance, clicking a “Get in touch” link might signal higher intent than scrolling. Using MTM, you can set a trigger for link clicks containing specific text and link it to a goal in Matomo.

Before publishing, MTM lets you test configurations in Preview Mode. This helps avoid deploying broken or incomplete setups. In the preview panel, you can see which tags have fired and troubleshoot issues before going live.

For more advanced setups, you can use a data layer. This is especially helpful when data isn’t visible on the page but is known internally (e.g. the author of a blog post). By exposing values like author names through the data layer, you can capture them with custom dimensions in Matomo. This does require collaboration with your developers.

As a final example, I showed how to set up a custom dimension for an “author” field using a data layer variable and configure it to send data via MTM on page load. Once deployed, this data appears in your Matomo reports and can be used for filtering and analysis.

That concludes the session. Matomo Tag Manager allows you to extend your tracking strategy far beyond what’s possible with the default snippet. With a bit of practice—and help from the documentation and video training available at matomo.org—you can build complex, privacy-focused tracking setups tailored to your goals.

If you have questions, please send them via the MatomoCamp contact form or the chat tool.