What Is Matomo Tag Manager and How to Use It?

Why Should You Use a Tag Manager?

Managing multiple tracking and marketing tags on your website can quickly become complex and time-consuming. Using a tag manager allows you to control and optimize this entire process from a single, centralized location. Here are the key advantages:

Manage All Tags from One Place

With a tag manager, you can manage all your tracking, marketing, and analytics tags from a single dashboard. This eliminates the need to manually add separate codes for different platforms and significantly reduces complexity.

Simplified Code Management

Instead of manually adding tracking and marketing codes directly to your website, you can add and update them through the tag manager. This approach reduces errors and allows for quick edits without requiring technical expertise.

Time and Cost Efficiency

With a centralized management tool, the processes of adding, updating, and testing tags become much faster and require less developer involvement. This results in significant savings in both time and cost.

Easier Marketing and Analytics Tracking

A tag manager simplifies campaign performance tracking, user behavior analysis, and conversion monitoring. Since data is collected centrally, you can make strategic decisions more quickly and accurately.

Data Layer Support

Many tag managers offer data layer support. This allows you to easily track user interactions, product details, or custom events on your website and pass that information directly to your tags.

Testing and Preview Features

A tag manager allows you to test and preview the tags you’ve added before they go live. This feature helps prevent errors and ensures data accuracy.

Easy Integration and More

It offers easy integration with popular analytics and marketing tools. In addition, it provides extra benefits such as managing tags without affecting the user experience, version control, and tracking change history.

How Does Matomo Tag Manager Work? (Tags, Triggers, and Variables)

Matomo Tag Manager operates on three fundamental building blocks when managing tags on your website: Tags, Triggers, and Variables. These three components work together to control which tag fires, when it fires, and under what conditions.

• Tags represent tracking or marketing codes.
• Triggers define the events or actions that cause those tags to activate.
• Variables share dynamic values—such as page information, user interactions, or custom data points—with the tags.

Through this structure, Matomo Tag Manager provides a flexible and powerful tag management system that enables precise and efficient control over your tracking setup.

Tags

Tags are the core component of Matomo Tag Manager. They contain all the tracking, analytics, and marketing integration codes used on your website. These tags allow you to monitor user behavior and measure the performance of your marketing campaigns.

When creating a tag in the Matomo Tag Manager panel, you can define the following details:

• The type of tag,
• The platform or tool it will be used for,
• The trigger it will be associated with.

Examples of tags and their use cases:

• Hotjar: Track user behavior and heatmap analytics.
• Meta Pixel (Facebook Pixel): Measure the conversion performance of your advertising campaigns.
• Google Ads Remarketing: Optimize your remarketing campaigns.
• Matomo Analytics Event Tracking: Track custom events or conversions.

By using these tags, you can manage all tracking and integration codes from a single panel, streamlining SEO-focused data collection and reporting processes.
The Tags panel also provides version control, testing, and preview features to ensure error-free implementation.

Triggers

Triggers determine when and under what conditions a tag will fire. In other words, you define the event or user interaction that activates a tag. In the Matomo Tag Manager panel, you can create triggers and link them to a single tag or multiple tags.

Examples of trigger types:

• Click Trigger: Activates a tag when a user clicks a button or link.
• Page View Trigger: Fires a tag when a user opens a specific page or visits a specific URL.
• Scroll Trigger: Fires a tag when the page is scrolled to a certain percentage.
• Form Submission Trigger: Activates a tag when a user submits a form.

These triggers help prevent unnecessary data collection, track user behavior accurately, and obtain SEO-focused analytics data. You can easily adjust trigger settings in the panel and connect one trigger to multiple tags to simplify management.

Variables

Variables represent dynamic data points used by tags and triggers in Matomo Tag Manager. The panel includes both default variables and allows you to add custom variables based on your needs.

Values stored in the Variables panel can be used automatically across all tags. For example, a page URL, product category, or user ID can be defined as a variable; when you update this variable, it automatically updates across all tags. This setup saves time in tag management and reduces the risk of errors.

Popular variable examples in Matomo Tag Manager:

• Page URL / Path / Title: Tracks page information dynamically.
• Click Element / ID / Classes: Captures details of click events.
• Custom JavaScript Variables: Retrieves custom data layer values for use in tags.
• Data Layer Variables: Automatically pulls user or product information from the data layer.

By using tags, triggers, and variables together, Matomo Tag Manager provides a centralized, flexible, and SEO-focused system to manage your website’s tracking infrastructure efficiently.

Publishing Changes in Matomo Tag Manager

In Matomo Tag Manager, all changes to tags, triggers, and variables do not automatically become active on your website after being saved in the panel. Therefore, to make your changes take effect on the live site, you need to perform a Publish action.

Before publishing, you can use Preview mode to check if your changes work correctly. Preview mode allows you to test tag firing times, variable values, and trigger behavior without affecting the live site.

Matomo Tag Manager also offers version control. Every change is saved as a version, allowing you to revert to a previous version if needed. This feature is especially useful when a mistake occurs or when you want to restore previous settings after testing.

In summary, the Publish process:

• Ensures that changes are actually reflected on the website,
• Prevents errors through testing and preview,
• Provides rollback options via version control,
• Allows you to use Matomo Tag Manager in a controlled and SEO-focused manner.

With this step, the guide covers all the fundamental processes of using Matomo Tag Manager and managing it with an SEO-oriented approach.