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Empowering People Ethically with the leading open source alternative to Google Analytics that gives you full control over your data. Matomo lets you easily collect data from websites & apps and visualise this data and extract insights. Privacy is built-in. Liberating Web Analytics. Star us on Github? +1. And we love Pull Requests!
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Summarize links by domain in external links widget #10767

Open tim-peters opened 8 years ago

tim-peters commented 8 years ago

The external links widget summarizes URLs by their full domain - which is apparently made to provide a better overview.

Unfortunately several social networks, search engines and big sites use different subdomains as referrers to other website. This e.g. leads facebook to appear several times in the list with domains such as lm.facebook.com, l.facebook.com, www.facebook.com etc. The problem is even more crucial with pinterest which has several subdomains for each country. If you have a site with a lot of visitors coming from pinterest, your whole external links widget can easily be full with just that one site. I don't think the summarization is meant to work like this.

It would be much more useful, if the widget would summarize by just the main part of the URL including all subdomains.

mattab commented 7 years ago

Hi @tim-peters Thanks for the feedback. would you mind showing a screenshot of how cluttered the report looks like?

Your suggestion to group by domain ignoring sub-domains, sounds good to me. But I wouldn't like to do it for all websites automatically - maybe it would make sense to implement a "Special rule" where we would only group all sub-domains together, for websites that are known to be "Social networks" ?

tim-peters commented 7 years ago

Thanks for your response. That sound like a good idea to me. I totally agree that ignoring sub-domains does not make sense for all websites.

Here is the screenshot screenshot_piwik