Import from Matomo
Connect Pulse to your Matomo instance and pull your history directly.
Read Import your history first for what an import is, who can run one, and how far back it can reach. This page covers Matomo's import specifically.
Matomo is the one source Pulse connects to directly rather than importing from a file. There's nothing to export or upload: you give Pulse your Matomo's address and a token, and Pulse pulls the history itself.
Connecting
You'll need two things:
- Your Matomo's address, over
https://on the standard port. Pulse validates the address is a real Matomo instance before it ever uses the token, so a wrong address surfaces as its own error rather than a token failure. - A token. Create one for a user with View access to only this site. Matomo has no way to scope a token more narrowly than the user it belongs to, so a token from a user with wider access gives Pulse wider access, whatever site you meant to connect.
Warning
Pulse can't revoke this token automatically. When you're done, or if you ever want to cut off access, delete it yourself in Matomo under Administration → Personal → Security → Auth tokens.
Once connected, choose which of your Matomo sites to import from, and how far back. Because this is a live connection rather than an upload, you can close the page once the import is running. There's no tab to keep open.
What's imported
- Visitors, visits and pageviews, per day
- Pages, and entry and exit pages
- Referrers and campaigns
- Countries, regions and cities
- Devices, browsers and operating systems
- Languages and screen sizes
What isn't
- Custom events and goals. Not yet: they're planned for a later release.
- Bounce rate and visit duration. Pulse shows its own, measured from the days it tracked itself. See Why imported numbers differ.
Worth knowing
A busy day can lose its longest tail of pages or referring sites. Matomo keeps at most 500 to 1,000 rows of a report per day by default. If your site had more distinct pages or referring sites than that on a single day, the rows past that cap aren't available to import, and Pulse has no way to tell that any were left out.
Visits Matomo recognises as bots are left out of some breakdowns, not others. They may still be counted in Matomo's own totals, and Pulse can't detect or exclude them there. But they're left out of the device, browser and operating system breakdowns Pulse imports.
A campaign click is recorded as Direct. Matomo's own campaign tracking doesn't expose whether the click carried a referrer, so Pulse can't tell either, and records it as Direct.