Which alternative to Google Analytics? Let's see Matomo together

We talked a lot about it on the decision of the Privacy Guarantor who has declared Google Analytics illegal. Our CTO analyzed the situation from his technical point of view, going against what seems to be the only vision of the problem today, in the light of the email from the now famous Federico Leva and the removal of Google Analytics data, however in conclusion and regardless of the respective positions, it is currently illegal to use Google Analytics and also Google Analytics 4 GA4.

By virtue of this, many insiders, including Web developers, web designers, marketers and advertisers are looking for a valid alternative to Google Analytics.

Therefore, we too, together with our customers, evaluated the offers on the market of tracking solutions similar to analytics that would guarantee full compliance with the criteria underlying the GDPR and in particular the permanence of data within the European territory, choosing Matomo.

What is Matomo?

Matomo, formerly known as Piwik, is a downloadable web analysis software platform e Delivery to Italy takes one or two business days (under GPL license). It provides detailed reports on your website and its visitors, including the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, the pages they like, the files they download, and so much more. Matomo (Piwik) aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. Matomo is PHP MySQL software that you download and install on your web server. At the end of the 5 minute installation process you will be assigned a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on the websites you want to monitor (or use an existing plugin to automatically do it for you).

What are the features of Matomo?

It can be difficult to keep track of all the features Matomo (formerly Piwik) has to offer. To find out if Matomo is the right web analytics tool for you, check out this ever-expanding list of features.

Web analytics functionality

All standard statistical reports: main keywords and search engines, websites, social media websites, main page URLs, page titles, user countries, provider, operating system, browser market share, screen resolution , desktop vs mobile, engagement (time on site, pages per visit, repeat visits), main campaigns, custom variables, main entry / exit pages, downloaded files and many more, classified into four main categories of analytics reports: visitors , actions, referrers, goals / e-commerce (over 30 reports).

• Data updates
  in real time See the flow of visits to your website in real time. Get a detailed view of your visitors, the pages they visited and the goals they activated.
• Customizable dashboard
  Create new dashboards with the widget configuration that suits your needs.
• Dashboard of all websites
  The best way to get an overview of what's happening on all your websites at the same time.
• Row evolution
  Current and past metrics data for any row in any report.
• Analysis for e-commerce
  Understand and improve your online business with advanced e-commerce analytics features.
• Goal Conversion Tracking
  track your goals and identify if you are achieving your current business goals. Goals can be activated when specific page URLs or page titles are displayed, when visitors stay on the website for a certain period of time, or when clicking on custom events / file downloads / outlinks.
• Event monitoring
  Measure any user interaction on your websites and apps.
• Tracking of contents
  Measure impressions, clicks, and CTR for image banners, text banners, and any element of your pages.
• Site Search Analytics
  Keep track of searches made on your internal search engine.
• Custom sizes
  Assign any custom data to your visitors or actions (such as pages, events, ...) and then view reports on how many visits, conversions, page views, etc. there were for each custom size.
• Custom variables
  similar to custom dimensions: custom name-value pair that you can assign to your visitors (or page views) using the JavaScript tracking API, then view reports on how many visits, conversions, etc. for each custom variable.
• Geolocation
  Locate your visitors for accurate country, region, city or organization tracking. View visitor statistics on a world map by country, region or city. View your latest visitors in real time.
• User segmentation
  View and analyze reports on groups smaller than your audience, based on specific criteria such as their country or whether they have purchased something (choose from over 110 segments available and combine them with the AND and OR operators to create your own custom segments) .
• Page transitions
  See what visitors have done before and after viewing specific pages.
• Page overlay
  View stats directly above your website with our smart overlay.
• Site speed and page speed reports
  It tracks how quickly your website delivers content to your visitors.
• Page performance reports
  Report detailed performance metrics for each pageview.
• Track different user interactions
  Automatic tracking of file downloads, clicks on links to external websites, optional 404 page tracking
• Analytics campaign tracking
  Keep track of your newsletters, any ads (Google Ads, Facebook Ads and personalized ads), automatically detect the parameters of the Google Analytics campaign in your URLs and more.
• Track traffic from search engines
  More than 800 different search engines monitored!
• Accurately measure the time visitors spend on your website (provides a more accurate bounce rate metric).
• Scheduled email reports (PDF and HTML reports)
  Embed reports in your app or website (over 40 widgets available) or embed PNG graphics on any page, email or custom app.
• Annotations
  Create text notes in your charts to remind you of particular events.
• Personalized alerts
  With custom alerts, you can monitor your activity and receive alerts on your phone or by email when any of your key performance indicators go up or down.
• Visits log
  Browse individual users' sessions and view all their interactions on your site.
• Visitor profile helps you understand the individual behavior of each visitor by summarizing and listing all their visits.
• No data limit
  You can keep all your data, without any storage limit, forever!

Premium functionality

• Analysis of heat maps- Your users' heat maps, scroll maps and clicks displayed in beautiful overlaid heat map reports.
• Session recording - Records all real visitor activity on a page, such as clicks, mouse movements, scrolls, window resizing, page changes, and form interactions. You can then play these interactions in a video to see exactly how a visitor interacted with your website.
• A / B testing platform - Experiment and optimize your websites, apps and marketing campaigns by running A / B test in running to increase your conversions.
• Personalized reports - Extract the information you need to be successful and gain new insights. Save a lot of time, money and reduce the risk of human error by creating new reports in seconds.
• Form Analytics : improve your forms in converting your users! Find out where and when visitors leave your forms.
• Media analysis : Powerful insights into how your audience watches your videos and hears your audio ( website ).
• View conversion funnels and understand where your visitors are going to increase conversions, sales and revenue with existing traffic.
• User Flow is a fantastic visual representation of the most popular paths your users have taken through your website or app. Get more information by analyzing those paths and where along the way they left your site.
• Performance detailed search engine keywords: all keywords searched by your users on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo are now visible in your Referrer reports! The ultimate solution to "keyword not defined" and "keyword not provided".
• Multi-channel conversion attribution : Gain a clear understanding of how much credit each marketing channel (referrer) is actually responsible for in order to shift your marketing efforts wisely.
• Export Conversion Export - Get insights into your paid ads but with better privacy and saving implementation time. It is no longer necessary to enter the tracking code for third-party ad networks on your site.
• Relationships cumulative allows you to aggregate data from multiple websites, mobile apps and stores into one (or more) cumulative sites to get new information and save time.
• User Cohorts allows you to view and compare the behavior of different cohorts over time to understand how well you care and engage your visitors.
• The SAML login plug-in allows your users to log into Matomo using SAML. Compatible with any SSO identity provider like OneLogin, Okta, Ping Identity, ADFS, Google, Salesforce.
• Control register details of user activity occurring on your analytics platform for better security and problem diagnostics.
• The White Label plug-in allows you to resell Matomo to your customers and gives them access to their analytics reports where all Matomo-branded widgets are removed.

Administration options

• Manage unlimited users
• Set up user access to multiple websites
• Manage unlimited websites
• Exclude IP and IP ranges
• Exclude URL parameters
• Time zone support, for each website
• It supports over 100 currencies
• Powerful Matomo White Label options are available, ideal for large agencies or when a clean, branded Matomo interface is needed
• Upload your own custom logo for the user interface and email reports
• Automatically delete old data logs and reports to reduce database size
• Integrate with various SSO solutions such as LDAP or SAML to allow your users to access Matomo using their existing user directory.
• It integrates with more than 100 CMS, web frameworks or e-commerce stores
• Access to SQL data allows you to run custom SQL queries on the database and even connect BI tools and data warehouses via SQL connector.

Additional features

• Import your data Google Analytics histories directly into your Matomo
• Official Matomo Mobile app for Android and iOS smartphones
• Free community support forums
• Paid support plans
• Over 50 languages ​​available
• 100% FREE software (open-source, GPL license), but compatible with commercial uses

Monitoring API

• By default, we recommend the Javascript Tracking API
• App Analytics with Matomo iOS SDK, Android SDK and Titanium Module.
• Asynchronous code for faster page loads
• Track and log all data using REST Tracking API, via PHP Tracking API Client or Java Tracking API Client, C # DotNet Tracker
• Track custom page URLs and page titles
• Keep track of subdomains
• User ID allows you to accurately measure your unique users across multiple devices.
• Cross-domain linking for accurate visitor tracking across different domain names.
• Supports both first party cookies (default) and third party cookies (optional)
• Import your Apache, Nginx, IIS server logs for processing in Matomo!
• Track detailed page speed and performance times for each pageview
• Track single page websites and web applications
• It supports unicode encoded pages (for example, UTF-8) but also supports all other character sets
• It supports offline monitoring for when users are not connected to the internet.

Data export and API

• Data export to Excel, XML, Json and more!
• Comprehensive analytics API to extract all your data (visitor level, action level, report and more)
• Administration API (REST) to pragmatically create / update / delete: user API, website API, target API, etc.
• Support for segmentation in the API

Log analytics : import and analyze your server logs

• Reprocess historical data from your server log files
• Report server errors and other http status codes
• Track and identify the search engine and other bots
• It supports many log files and easily adds your own custom log formats

Technical Requirements

• Compatible with Windows, MacOs, Linux, Solaris, IIS, Apache, Nginx and others
• Long-term support: Matomo is the analytics platform for your mission-critical projects
• Installation in 5 minutes
• Other one-click installation options: Softaculous, Installatron and our official Debian Matomo package.
• Easy one-click update
• Strong focus on software security and an excellent track record
• Strong focus on software quality assurance and testing
• Compatible with high traffic websites
• It supports servers behind proxies, works in a load balanced architecture, and supports IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
• It works for intranet websites
• Using JavaScript by default, Matomo can also import server logs or track analytics of your mobile apps.
• Search bot crawl overview reports
• Customer data platform and data management platform
• Keep your data private on your server

User privacy

• Privacy-compliant web analytics, including powerful GDPR tools to exercise data subject rights: data subject request, data deletion, etc.
• Setting to anonymize the IPs of your visitors and the option not to store any IP addresses
• Iframe included to allow the visitor to disable Matomo tracking
• DoNotTrack support by default
• Option for analysis without cookies and disable all cookies
• Option to impose the disabling of all cookies on all websites tracked in Matomo
• Option to disable the visit log and visitor profile features
• Ask for consent
• It uses first party cookies by default, with an option to enable third party cookies
• Replace User ID with a pseudonym
• Ability to make the referrer anonymous to avoid accidental tracking of personal data

Community contributions

• Open Marketplace with 100+ Plug-Ins - Enhance your Matomo analytics with valuable additional features.
• Themes for Matomo: do you want to change color? Try our community submitted themes or create your own!
• CMS plugins: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more than 100 other software! With one of our Matomo integration plugins.
• Programming language libraries: Python, Ruby and more!

Matomo is an award-winning platform used by over 1 million websites around the world and they release new features.

Why choose Matomo as a substitute for Google Analytics?

In short, Matomo allows you to manage all the technical and technological aspects of the analysis software in an autonomous self-hosted mode in full compliance with the GRDP and in full compliance with the European regulation on privacy.

In fact, it is sufficient to select a European datacenter on which to install Matomo and automatically you are compliant with the regulation that prohibits the export of personal data outside the European community.

The functionalities made available as we have seen above are really many and allow to obtain optimal results in the process of data analysis, with a view to measuring to decide.

The costs are also very affordable for those who decide to use it in self-hosted mode, having only the foresight to rent the server instance for installing the software.