File download tracking about gatsby-plugin-matomo HOT 7 OPEN

enableLinkTracking is added by default with this plugin and I found this automatic outlink/download link tracking covering most use cases. For me, the Behavior > Outlinks & Behavior > Downloads lists in Matomo get populated as expected.

But that automatic detection is based on a pre-defined list of file extensions Matomo uses to detect download links. Are you using any other extension than in this list maybe? If so I could add an option to add more file extensions for the automatic link tracking.

7z|aac|arc|arj|apk|asf|asx|avi|bin|bz|bz2|csv|deb|dmg|doc|
exe|flv|gif|gz|gzip|hqx|jar|jpg|jpeg|js|mp2|mp3|mp4|mpg|
mpeg|mov|movie|msi|msp|odb|odf|odg|odp|ods|odt|ogg|ogv|
pdf|phps|png|ppt|qt|qtm|ra|ram|rar|rpm|sea|sit|tar|
tbz|tbz2|tgz|torrent|txt|wav|wma|wmv|wpd||xls|xml|z|zip

For full manual control you could always use the tracker object on window directly, like:

<a href="/static/somefile.zip" download onClick={() => window._paq.push(['trackLink', 'https://myurl.com/static/somefile.zip', 'download'])}>Download</a>

But that's rather cumbersome obviously

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good point @samajammin, enableLinkTracking is not added to the initial generated static page, but fired on client-side only in gatsby-browser.js for every route change on Gatsby's onRouteUpdate trigger: https://github.com/kremalicious/gatsby-plugin-matomo/blob/master/src/gatsby-browser.js#L36

I based this on somewhat of an educated guess, where I understood that for a single page application Matomo needs that so not only links on the initial page are tracked, but also on subsequent visited pages. And a user arriving on the first landing page will fire onRouteUpdate, which will then actually record the first page view hit, and enable link tracking for that route.

That being said, I never fully explored link tracking since it seemed to just work with that implementation. There's probably a case to be made, which needs to be verified and tested, to put enableLinkTracking within the initial tracking code and see how Gatsby behaves with its static and hydrated pages. So I'll keep this issue open for now in case anybody else has some experiences to share, thanks everyone so far for reporting back!

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Following up on this for folks who are curious.

Since migrating our site to Gatsby (& using this Matomo plugin) on 6/25, we have seen a significant jump (~2x) in outlinks:

This would support your theory @kremalicious that link tracking should be enabled on every route change, though I'm not sure how to verify this.

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I think this would be covered by #2

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Thanks for clarifying.
I found what the problem was: The downloads were hidden inside a foldout component. After switching to "hidden" instead of not rendering, it worked.

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Thanks @kremalicious!

enableLinkTracking is added by default with this plugin

I'm curious why I can't see it in the script code.

Here's the snippet I have in a <script> tag on my old site:

        var _paq = window._paq || [];
        _paq.push(['trackPageView']);
        _paq.push(['enableLinkTracking']);
        (function() {
            ...
        })();

Inspecting the DOM in dev mode with this plugin, I'm not seeing it:

    window.dev = true
    if (window.dev === true || !(navigator.doNotTrack === '1' || window.doNotTrack === '1')) {
      window._paq = window._paq || [];
      window._paq.push(['setTrackerUrl', 'https://matomo.ethereum.org/matomo.js/matomo.php']);
      window._paq.push(['setSiteId', '4']);
      window._paq.push(['enableHeartBeatTimer']);
      window.start = new Date();
      (function() {
          ...
      }
    }
  

Is it being configured under the hood somewhere?

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Thanks for the quick response & explanation @kremalicious!

FWIW, the previous site used VuePress & the outlink tracking appeared to working when added to just the initial generated static page. Perhaps the only tracking we had was when the user landed on that given page though, so I can't verify if that's the correct approach.

I'll keep an eye on our data with this new configuration & let you know if this shows similar results or not.

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