Matomo

Matomo is a web analytics tool that helps businesses view, evaluate, and analyze user website activity by using session recordings, goal tracking, A/B testing, and heatmaps features, among others. By analyzing website action, Matomo enables marketers to create user and consumer profiles.

The software has a built-in tag manager, allowing administrators to use third-party tracking codes to monitor website performance across marketing campaigns. Matomo also offers white-label features, letting users personalize the app's interface with custom themes, fonts, logos, and colors.

Furthermore, Matomo integrates with many third-party business apps, such as Drupal, WordPress, Magento, Odoo, SharePoint, PrestaShop, to name a few. And regarding the software's price, it is free to use as it is open-source. Customer support via FAQs and user guides is available too.

Matomo is a fantastic web analytics platform for every enterprise or freelancer. Matomo ensures that visitor and customer behavior is analyzed efficiently and accurately. Also, bloggers will find the software fascinating by tracking visitor activity. Thus, they can understand their audience better.

Cloud and On-Premise Hosting

Matomo is an open-source web analytics platform with superior privacy protection, one-hundred percent data ownership, and no data sampling. And it has two different hosting options, cloud, and on-premise. By choosing cloud, everything happens online, remotely, whereas on-premise gives access to a self-hosted PHP or MySQL software. Users can install this software on their server, maximizing flexibility and control over visitor activity.

Furthermore, Matomo, as a premium web analytics and conversion optimization tool, is designed to offer conclusive insights with a complete package of attractive features, such as session recordings, heatmaps, e-commerce, and funnels. On that note, the software provides real-time updates about visitor data. It also has event tracking to identify user interaction with the website, conversion tracking to monitor business objections, and A/B testing to optimize marketing campaigns.

Easy to Set Up

Matomo is easy to set up, manage, and use to implement tracking. As mentioned above, it includes most of the advanced features that you'd expect to find in a subscription-paid analytics solution. The deployment on websites also is a breeze.

Superb Internal Data Measurement

Matomo is recommended for internal data measurement, such as intranet community data. The statistics are relative to visit logs with a detailed card for each website visit. By using this information, businesses can push forward strategies to help them improve traffic and customer experience. Consequently, Matomo makes an excellent local alternative for Google Analytics.

Even though Matomo has an active community that provides immediate responses to user queries, there are not many articles or guides explaining how to take full advantage of the tool. The existing articles, however, are well-written, concise, and comprehensive. Another minor issue with Matomo is that it does not integrate seamlessly with Google. Well, that makes sense as it is not licensed or owned by Google. It would be great to see a smoother integration, though.

Moreover, Matomo has a bit weak reporting capability. But at least users can export the data, as the app supports both Microsoft Excel and Tableau. In addition, using this export feature with a non-traditional web page like the React software requires extra work to understand Matomo's behavior. And it also has a bit outdated tables. Users desiring advanced event analytics of apps and the web, at the same time, might also find that Matomo is not the best platform.But it's perfect for smaller websites or enterprises or where dynamic GDPR guidelines are needed.

Matomo launched in 2007 as Piwik, with full API support and modern graphs. It is developed by Matthieu Aubry and Maciej Zawadziński. In 2012, Piwik started crowdfunding for new features requested by users. Six years later, in 2018, it changed its name to Matomo. On top of that, it was announced over 1 million websites were using Matomo. Finally, in 2019, it released a WordPress plugin called Matomo Analytics, which allowed WordPress users to host the analytics platform directly in their WordPress installation package.