Training

How to Measure Your Online Business with Matomo 4+

Matomo? First the Advantages...

One of the most important advantages of Matomo, a very popular web analytics tool, is certainly the storage of the data on your (own) server. Matomo complies with the EU Data Privacy. It also allows "unlimited" creation of users, storage of data, web pages and exports.

The advantages for you as a user (an entrepreneur or a stakeholder in marketing, sales, management, corporate governance) are:

• Matomo makes data available in a manageable way in a dashboard
• Contains advanced functions, various options
• Open Source, can be viewed and changed by programmers

You will now get an overview of the most important functions.

How Matomo Displays Data in the Dashboard...

After calling Matomo in your browser, you are immediately directed to a dashboard. The visually designed dashboard contains many individual windows, called widgets. The widgets display data in various formats, more about this later.

The selection of the appropriate data, called key point indicators (KPIs), depends on your role as a stakeholder.

You will now be presented with some widgets to answer your questions, with sample data and insights.

Do We Have Visitors?

The following visitor widgets show some sample data from different perspectives.

The "Graph of the last visits" shows how the interest of the visitors varies greatly over the course of 4 weeks (example: about 4000 -6470 visitors per day). This screenshot shows that more visitors visit the website during the working days on Monday.

You can find the daily number of visitors to the website through the widget "Visitor overview".

You can see how many visitors have visited the website (5282), their average length of stay (3min 24s) and other data.

You may ask how this information helps you in your decisions. Well, if you compare this data with the data from the same day in the last week, you can draw conclusions on your part. Or, if you compare the visits of a whole month with the previous month, a tendency/pattern would be visible.

Conclusion: If these figures are compared in a meaningful way, the data will support you in your decisions.

What Interests the Visitors?

The "entry page" of the visitors is very important. Here it becomes clear what interests your visitors, how they became aware of your company website.

The pages fall into very different categories. For example, there are pages that inform, landing pages and pages that turn visitors into customers (convert).

Which Marketing Has Attracted Visitors?

One of the most important questions to answer is certainly which marketing led your visitors to the website.

Among the search engines as channel types, the screenshot shows that the search engines with 3303 visits with a considerable distance to the next channel type of social networks, only 868, directed most visitors to the website.

If the data is presented in a different format, you may gain new insights. Click on the second list-like icon in the bottom left corner. A menu appears, visible on the next screenshot, with different formats to choose from.

Tip: Regarding the Insights field. If a large difference is visible both negatively or positively, it is possible that unequal data was compared here. For example, data are not comparable if the data set of an entire day is compared with the data set of the next morning.

Do Your Visitors Call Up Your Pages Locally/Internationally?

With the Visitor Map widget, you can determine from which region your target audience is visiting the site.

For detailed results, click on a specific country or select the country, for example Norway or Germany. Regarding location/language, there are other widgets available to answer further questions.

Is It Possible to Change/Segment the (visitor) Data in the Dashboard?

For this last question of the Dashboard, the short answer is: Yes! You will find a bar at the top of the Matomo tool. From there it is possible to change/segment the visitor data.

The basic dashboard settings are mostly sufficient for an overview as a top stakeholder. However, you can view, add or change many more widgets under the "Dashboard" button.

If you have advanced analytics knowledge, you create the segment yourself. Click the third button from the left. You will get a dialog box where you can create the appropriate links. In the dialog box, give the new segment a suitable name.

To change or select the segmentation, click on the third button, which is currently labeled "All Visits". There should be more segments listed, select a segment here "German visitors". The widgets in the dashboard now only contain the data for the segment.

Further Possibilities of the Dashboard

That was a sample of the possibilities available to you through the dashboard. Matomo offers manageable web analytics for all stakeholders. Matomo has other options at hand. On Matomo you will find, besides the just shown key figures and visitor segmentation, even more: e-commerce, campaign, event and conversion tracking and more.

Matomo Advanced Functions, Extensions

Matomo now has a whole range of advanced features. Those may be interesting for your company if you want to get much more out of your web analytics. It is worth considering some widgets, especially:

• Shows you the journey of visitors through your website ("Users-Flow")
• Where/When visitors leave the tunnel, conversion optimization ("Funnels")
• TTesting which page performs better, conversion optimization ("A/B Testing")
• Brings together various visitor data from shops, apps etc. ("Roll-up Reporting")

Note: The widgets cost $29-229 a year. Google Analytics, on the other hand, provides many of these features for free. However, Google Analytics may be subject to charges or restrict the length of time user data is stored. One option, if legal conditions are met for Google Analytics, is to use both web analytics tools. Do not compare the data, their algorithms may differ!

Matomo Open Source

As already mentioned Matomo is open source. The code is therefore accessible. Everything that happens with the data is transparent. This also means that ambitious web analytics projects can be realized with Matomo. Matomo has an "Application Programming Interface" - API, which can be used by programmers.

Do You have Questions Regarding Matomo?

The web analytics tool Matomo is suitable for entrepreneurs or stakeholders with various expertise. The tool offers a fast and relevant overview through a personalized dashboard. If you have questions regarding the usage or need help with the setup on your own server, contact me.

Autor/in: Iris Mitlacher