Matomo offers a Real-time Map feature so you can quite literally review your location visits as they are happening. This report view is located under the Visitors sub-menu accessed through the main navigation menu on the left hand side of the page.

The Real-time Map shows the location of recent visitors on your site with the duration span displayed at top left. Large orange bubbles represent more recent visits, while smaller grey bubbles represent older visits. This data refreshes every five seconds, and new visitors appear with a flashing effect.

Animated Real-Time Visitor World Map

An example of when this might be useful is if you are running a scheduled television or radio advertisement within a specific location and you’d like to get an immediate read of its conversion to website traffic. It can also be helpful if you have a low traffic site that has just launched as you can use the map to check the accuracy of your visits to the website. And last but not least, you can also use real-time location data to help you identify the source of attacks if you are suddenly hit with lots of bot traffic and this may enable you to take action to temporarily prevent traffic from a certain region.

Analyse location data with Real-Time Maps

To get more information about any of these visits, you can hover your mouse over the circle. This will display a tooltip that typically includes information on the page viewed alongside data on the specific tracked location, local time, device information and acquisition source.

Real-Time Map Tooltip

By default, the real-time map shows the whole world. However, you can also zoom in on specific countries and regions by clicking on them if you require more detail. This is especially helpful for analysing the impact of localised marketing campaigns in real time or if you have many visits within a region. You can zoom out by clicking on the map again.

Real-Time Region Map

Real Time Visitors Map Widgets

The Matomo Real Time Visitor Map is also available as a widget. For example, below we include the Maps showing real time visits from a demo site:

Learn more about creating and embedding custom widgets here (Developer Resource).

Dashboard Widget

If location data is important for your marketing efforts it is possible to create a custom dashboard containing a map widget so you can easily check it alongside other key data. While creating a custom dashboard you can the map under Dashboard > Add a widget > Visitors > Real-time map

Real-Time Map Widget

Previous FAQ: The visits in real-time report