Matomo Analytics vs. Request Metrics

Matomo is a full-fledged website tracking and analytics tool. It offers everything and then a bit more that GA has to offer. I cannot conceive of any situation where this programme would be "less appropriate". You can use it for each and every website and do well with it. The data it provides includes everything you could wish for (country, IP, new user or not, actions taken, goals achieved etc.)

Request Metrics is great for small web development teams that want to make fast web applications. It was quick for us to get started and we could use the reports right away without having to read through documentation. If you just need to get some performance metrics, Request Metrics is perfect. It would not be so good for a larger team or a complex backend application as it is pretty limited in what it can measure.

• One of Piwik's strengths is the provision of customizable widgets for different bits of analytics data. The ability to add and remove them, change dates and more makes this a flexible way to visualize data.
• The visitor log section is also rich, providing date, keywords, actions and more in a single table, which makes it easy to identify your most effective content.
• And the visitor actions table includes both bounce rate and time on site, so you can quickly tell which pages have the most engagement.
• Data display is a strength for Piwik, as you have access to overview charts while simultaneously being able to drill deeper.

• Performance charts are really simple and easy for us to understand what is happening
• It was easy to get started and doesn't need administration or training
• It's affordable for our team
• It's fast

• From a user security standpoint it would be useful to provide users the ability to have two-factor authentication. While stats data is not necessarily sensitive in aggregate, some users may feel that certain portions need to be more secure.
• It would be nice if there was a tighter integration with the Google search/referrer API so that "keyword not defined" would be replaced more often with the actual keyword that is being used to send a visitor to a site.
• An easier branding method, maybe in the form of an API function set, that pulled branding URLs from a set of database fields would be great as well.

• I wish that it could also do uptime checking of the site
• There is not enough detail to drill into individual users

At this point, there is not a single conceivable reason as to why we would not renew and continue to use Piwik Analytics. Especially since it is a free program and open source. The product will only get better over time as more people look into it and donate to cause so that development can continue.

Piwik succeeds in presenting me (and my associates and my clients...) large amounts of data in a user friendly way. The interface and functionality can easily be customized. While some enhancements do need technical background (API calls by programming language from the webserver or javascript), others are easy to use (goal / event tracking)

The best thing about the Matomo support is that they have a forum which basically you can find the answer to almost all of your questions and most of the time you don't need to contact them regarding your questions and problems but if you need help they will answer in a reasonable time slots.

Incentivized

Only one hiccup when we were using a beta installation. Other than that, smooth sailing.

We have used Google Analytics before for one of our online tools and we switched to Matomo for the other web applications we have. We did that because Matomo is free but mostly since we wanted us to own the data on these sensitive apps and not share it with third parties. Since we have the data locally, we can now apply machine learning techniques to improve the systems even more.

Incentivized

We also consider Speedcurve and Calibre for monitoring. Speedcurve was really nice, but the reports were slow. We had to wait a lot to get information. It was also out of our budget and would require extra justification to use it. Calibre was also nice, but the numbers were based on synthetic rather than real user performance. We felt that this wasn't as helpful for us.

• By using Piwik, we can better identify keywords used to search for the website and by targeting those keywords on search engine advertising (Google, Bing, Yahoo), it helps with conversion and also saves us money by cutting down guess work.
• By using Piwik graphs, it helps to save our employees time in creating pie charts and bar charts to present to upper management.
• Since Piwik is free to use, there is no reason not to implement it. Most likely, with your website, you will already have access to SQL and hosting package. There is minimal cost to implementing Piwik.

• The launch of our project dashboard was much smoother and more successful because we could fix problems earlier
• It fit without our existing operations budget