So What? Setting up Matomo Analytics in 2024

Well, hey, howdy, everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Katie joined by Chris and John. Howdy, fellas.

This week with 100% less projectile vomiting. Oh man, it was like worse than UMass drinking last week. I tell you. I'm like so good. We're back.

Oh my goodness. What a welcome back. Um this week, this week, we are talking about Matomo Analytics and setting it up. Um, you know, we've done some informal polling and we know that everybody is very frustrated with Google Analytics for. However, they are kind of locked into Google Analytics 4.

So what we wanted to do today was cover an alternative that you can set up to run in parallel with Google Analytics 4. Does not affect the speed of your site. Uh does not double count your data in Google Analytics and what that looks like to set it up. So the basics of Matomo Analytics as a GA alternative, how to get your Atomo, how to get it set up correctly, and what data you'll have access to through Matomo to supplement if you are caged into using Google Analytics for. So, Chris, you have been talking about Mitomo Analytics for a very long time.

Where would you like to start? Let's start with what the heck is this thing? So, Matomo is a piece of open source software. You can find it at Matomo.org. And you can use it a couple different ways.

You can uh use their hosting service, which you have to pay for. You can also run it on your server if you have a server internally. Download install it. And then if you use WordPress on a WordPress host, you can actually download it and install it as a WordPress plugin, and then you don't have to do any of the admin at all. It just runs inside your website.

So on the Trust Insights website, that's exactly what we did. We used the Matomo plugin, plopped it in. We use uh WP Engine as our host, so it is robust enough to handle the somewhat extra load that it adds to your your site server, and it just runs to give you a sense of what it is. Motomo is very much like Google Analytics was like five years ago. Maybe five, like you go by the way back machine in the days before Google Analytics, which actually is now four years old.

Um, the GA4 is four years old now, but you go back to Universal Analytics five years ago, seven years ago, and that's pretty much what this software is. I think for companies that don't have huge analytics requirements, this is a great drop-in. Uh, it might even be your first choice for analytics. I think about, for example, my my martial arts teacher at the Boston Martial Arts Center. He doesn't need all the bells and whistles of GA4.

He doesn't need to have tag manager and and Looker Studio and all that. He just wants to see how many people came to my website and how many people sign up for uh, you know, to take a class. Uh, even at Trust Insights, we don't do anything that is so crazy and arcane that we would need the full power of GA4 and you know the e-commerce measurement stuff. Like we you can buy courses from us, um, you can uh hire us to work with you on your analytics and data science and AI, but we're not doing anything super super complicated. We're not running a mobile app in parallel and trying to figure out all these different things.

Oh, we just want to know who came to the website and who did the thing. Katie, um, you were you've been talking a lot the last month or two about how to get the answers you want as a CEO, it's really hard to get them out of GA4. It is, and it's been really frustrating because we covered this uh a couple of weeks ago in the live stream. Uh, if you want to watch that episode, you can catch it on our channel, trust insights.ai slash YouTube. Look for the so what playlist.

And even after that conversation, I felt a little bit more confident using Explorer within Google Analytics 4, but I still it was too many things to get to one single answer. I couldn't just put together a report and say, okay, this is what I'm looking for. And the questions I was asking weren't complicated. I wanted to know what external actions, what channels external to our website were leading to conversions. And it was a very tricky answer, tricky answer to get to because of how Google Analytics 4 is set up because they have now they're giving you three phases of their version of the customer journey.

So you have the beginning, middle, and end, and you're like, okay, cool, but I just want to know. Maybe I just want to know last touch. Well, they're taking away all of those options for attribution and basically giving you data-driven, which is you know what they're calling their attribution model, which gives weight first to Google ads, which we're not running. So there's a lot of things to unpack in that, which you know, we did in that other episode. I just want to know what are we doing that's working.

And I feel like it shouldn't be that difficult to answer the question. And so I'm really, really interested to see what I can get from Matomo instead. Um, and I guess before we even get into that, Chris, Matomo is not the only Google Analytics alternative on the market. There's other alternatives that people are looking to choose. Why Motomo?

So Matomo for a couple reasons. One, it is very low cost. I mean, for us, it requires essentially just a little bit more space and a little bit of technical know-how to install it as a WordPress plugin. Um, if you didn't have WordPress, then it would be the cost would be you know, having someone deploy it on the server. Two, and this is a big one for uh locations which have privacy sensitivities.

Motomo is hosted and run on your servers, which means you control the data, you control the tracking, you control what has access to it. So if you, for example, are in the EU, Google Analytics 4 still is not GDPR compliant, not fully. Uh, there are still issues with it. Matomo, when you host it on your hardware, it is not transmitting data to any third party, which means that one of the big complaints that the EU has about GA4 is resolved. Your the data is not crossing borders, it runs on your server, and so you have that level of privacy.

If you are doing stuff with consent management, uh again, Matomo is a really great solution because it's on your server, right? So there is no third party that data is being relayed to, and therefore there is no additional privacy concerns. Um, if you work in healthcare and you're using you want web analytics on, say, like a patient app, you must use a service like this where that data never leaves your network. And I feel like those are considerations that other solutions may have, but they're glossing over because they know that consumers are looking for ease of use and regulations and settings are secondary. First, they want to know can I get the stupid thing to work?

Exactly. Now, the trade-offs, you don't get integration with Google Ads, for example. So you won't get the optimizations from performance max campaigns and things. Um the attribution modeling is essentially last touch, right? So if you're if you want to do something more sophisticated, you will have to get the your data out of your Matomo database and build your own like more sophisticated attribution modeling.

And of course, it is a new interface to learn, although it's very familiar to those folks who remember Universal Analytics of 2020. Uh, so those are some of the trade-offs you do make with this. Uh, and of course, it is something you have to administer. So if you accidentally delete your database, there's no one to help you. John, no touching the database.

I know, I know. And no playing around in SQL to get it going. I was surprised. They do have a full, you know, if you want to go with them hosted, they have a full array of services as far, you know, everything as far as being able to dynamically set it up to integrate with all your other systems and do a bunch of stuff. So it is full featured, but yeah, it's that's a it's a really interesting point of kind of do you go with cloud hosted and have them manage everything and take all the headaches away, or are you the kind of org where no, it's just got to be in-house, and that's not even hosting with them, it's not a question.

But um, yeah, and then the other thing that got me was their WordPress plugin, like the fact that if you have WordPress, this is not a headache at all. If you want them to just manage the traffic and make it go, that's huge. Okay, so let's dig into just the the brief setup. So I'm going to assume that you were able to get it installed in some fashion. Again, if you're on a WordPress site, install the plugin.

Uh, we're not going to go through server setup on a Linux server because that that's that's a whole other episode. Yeah, let's let's not do that. Not right now. Um, not been enough espresso today for that. Uh however, configuring the software itself, very straightforward.

So, this is what it looks like when you first get into the system that you go to our settings up here. And again, there's you're gonna see some pretty familiar stuff. So, in the system for the your general settings, the um you'll probably want to specify your cross domains. So, for example, we have the Modic system, the open source marketing automation software. So, we and that has its own subdomain.

Uh, we would probably want to add something in like uh Trust Insights Academy, so the academy. That would go in here as well. Um you also have the ability to turn off certain things and also provide other privacy things, and and Matomo does make its own tag manager if you want to use it. Uh, I'm still comfortable using Google Tag Manager for what we do. But again, if you were in a in a protected environment like healthcare or financial services, you'd absolutely want to use the Matomo Tag Manager because that also runs on your servers.

Well, and if you're running Matomo in parallel because you want to make sure you're collecting all of your data, but you're running Google Analytics already, does it make sense to keep everything in Google Tag Manager for both Google Analytics and Matomo? So you're not running two separate tag manager instances. That's correct. That's the that's a smart way to do it. Okay.

That's like head exploding for me. I'm like, oh, wait a minute. Yeah, that does make sense. I my concern would be if Google would mess with it because it's in there, but they don't care. There's so many other tags from all over the damn place that they're not gonna care.

Okay. Um exactly head reassembled. I'm good. Uh you will notice that uh there is a because it's it is uh viable in the EU thanks to GDPR, you'll notice there's a number of privacy options. So, for example, you can decide what how much you want anonymize different tracking data, you can uh treat either override or not override certain types of uh tracking.

You can cleanse old data if you have regulatory requirements or anonymize previously tracked data. All these things are required by GDPR uh and also CPR, the California privacy uh legislation. So you're if you don't know what to do, your best bet is just follow the general recommendations. They are, I would call it like a medium level of privacy. Um but all of these tools exist so that you can comply fully comply with regulations.

So, for example, the GDPR tool. If someone emails you and says, I want you to, you know, I want to exercise my right to be forgotten. Go right in here to the G D PR tools and say, okay, let me find you, and poof, you're gone. And all the data about you. I'm going to start using that.

I'm just going to start having my auto-responder on my email to anyone who emails me saying I exercise my right to be forgotten. Please forget me. I don't care who you are, just forget me already. Yeah, because what that's totally impossible in GA, right? You can't just be like forget this person.

No, you can. There is a data deletion request tool in GA4. How well it works, we don't know. And Google has been sued by the EU for cross-border data processing where data is in GA4 is being executed in other locations outside the EU. Italy, I think, sued them recently about that.

Nothing like being sued by a whole country. No. This is the section that is most relevant to marketers. Setting up your goals, right? So uh again, this is not like in GA4 where you have to do things like setting up tags and triggers and stuff in tag manager that then correspond to events in GA4.

This is classic universal analytics. Let's pick a goal. So we're gonna add a new goal here. And again, so you can it there's your name, your description, and then you can have when visitors or manual triggers of goals, um, which would be like a JavaScript. You have a special JavaScript on your site that can fire an event, it can listen for that.

Or when your visitor does something like visits a specific URL or a page title or downloads a file or something like that, you can specify um, like I could set as a goal if you want to download the trust Insights prompt sheet. If you go to TrustInsites.ai/slash prompt sheet there's a PDF on there if you download that sheet I can track that specific PDF and say okay that was a goal that was accomplished um but again this these settings are almost identical to the old universal analytics goals uh page use events uh file downloads and things so if I had a visit URL I could say the URL contains or has a regular expression thank you page contact page whatever the thing may be all of it very simple um some of it you can case sensitive match and then you can decide uh should the goal be something that people can trigger multiple times per visit or is it a one time per visit uh thing depending on what you want and of course stick a number on there if you know what a a goal is worth you can put that in there so again this should be very very familiar and very comfortable ground for anyone who remembers universal analytics. That is like I'm looking at this I'm like why can't Google Analytics 4 be like this is so straightforward. What's the name of your goal? What are people doing?

Where does it live? How many times can they like it is so straightforward. This is when people talk about like oh I wish there was a setup wizard this is what it should be. Mm-hmm. Oh my God anyway.

But yes this is exactly what is happening this is this is old fashioned universal analytics. You can set up custom dimensions. So if you have specific custom dimensions you want to install, uh either at the visit level or the action level, you can put them in. And unlike Google Analytics, if you want to increase the number of custom dimensions, you can do that. You have to do it at the server level because custom dimensions consume extra bandwidth uh all the time because they're added to every visit.

But you can do that. You can say, hey, go to the console, make more custom dimensions. The software doesn't care. It's your server, it's not their server. Um, so you could you could put 400 custom dimensions.

You so it would probably grind to a halt, but but you the point is you can do that. You have the flexibility to do that. That's pretty cool. And then finally, your diagnostics. So you can say, like, hey, uh, something's wrong.

Go check here, look at the log and say, did something, you know, something that appears to be broken. Is there anything that's that's going wrong um with the setup itself? So those are tools that just to because you are self-hosting it, you'd want to be able to know something's gone wrong and then call for help. Uh you would contact someone like us, for example, if you wanted your your Matomo thing uh fixed. So that's the setup.

Again, super simple, super straightforward. GA from 2015. Any marketer who is reasonably skilled at universal analytics can dust off those skills and get up and running in Matomo in less than an hour, I would say. I want to point out the other thing that Matomo is doing really nicely, that Google Analytics changed uh and is really frustrating. The labels on the menu are very clear and they are what they are meant to be: measurables, privacy, diagnostics.

I know what each of those things is or what I expect to be in there before I even click on it. Like, hallelujah, man. It I mean, it is a big contrast. If you were to, if you go in and you look at you know the GA4 setup menu now, it looks like this. It's like, okay, so that's a lot.

It is, and you don't really know what to do with half of it, but you know it's all important, and everything has its own other separate info descriptor menu. It's like when I was doing uh UX as a product manager. The big pushback we got was if it has to have one of those like info pop-ups, it's too complicated. How can we simplify it? Because if everyone has to look up every single thing on the page, you're doing it wrong.

Right. There's literally one of those on every single thing. Every single thing. Yep. I'm just outraged today in general.

It there's nothing wrong with that. Okay, so let's go to the dashboard and let's see what's in the software. The dashboard itself, of course, this is your typical homepage. And if you want to, you can add and move the widgets and stuff if you want it to be, you know, uh customized. But again, the the menus, like you're saying, very simple.

Let's look at our visitors, uh, go to our visitors' overview. One of the things that's really nice is they have very quick, just descriptive summaries. Hey, you had in this, so this is yesterday. Let's actually do it, look at the you can do day, week, month, yeah, or custom ranges. Let's look at at the week.

Um, from February 26th to March 3rd, 1,092 visits, 922 unique visitors, minus point 68% compared to the uh the previous period, 45 second average visit duration. So there's a lot and a lot of nice little narrative here where you can look at this and very quickly go, okay. I I I get a sense of what happened in the last week. This, by the way, makes total sense if folks are like, why does that look so bad? Well, because last week we were at social media marketing world, we were on stage uh telling people to go check out our stuff and download the things, and we got a ton of traffic last week.

This week we're we're back in our basements. Well, I'm in our basement. Yeah, mine's mine's at least ground level. Exactly. The top of the world.

John's on the second floor. Second floor. Very nice. Um but we know we know what happened last week. So we can look at that, and it's not surprising to us, thankfully.

So can you can users annotate the way that you could in Google Analytics Universal? Um, I have not come across that. Um but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist because it because it is open source, you can install plugins. There's a whole set of plugins that you can install that, and that may be an option. We're looking at the vanilla right out of the box.

This is what you get. Gotcha. Um, if you want to look at individual user profiles and what they're doing, like here's somebody from Canada. You can see uh what they're doing. You of course have your real-time logs and your real-time uh map of where people are coming from.

Uh, you can look at your locations and demographics, all again, very, very basic stuff um to understand what's happening. Like, so here, for example, you know, when is the site most busy? Like, this is just a helpful menu. Like, you could you don't have to build a report in Explore Hub for this. You can go, okay, we get busy starting at 7 a.m.

Makes sense. Exactly. And the reason we get that busy starting at 7 a.m. is because a lot of the time during the week, um, that's when a lot of our social posts start going out. So that's visitors behaviors.

Again, we are looking at classic 2015 Google Analytics. You can see what pages uh are getting the most visits. So, this is our blog. You can go through our infrastructure our our blog architecture and see, you know, this is that post, the disclosure of AI and copyright and that post does well all the time. It's one always one of our top pages.

What pages do people come in on? What pages do people leave on? Looking at those page titles and the unique page use on them. Um, if you have site search set up, which you got uh you would want to configure, you can look at what people are searching for, where people click out to after they've been to the site, um, which we like to see, for example, the the academy. We want people going there, what things they're downloading.

So there's uh some of our slides from from the last couple weeks, and so on and so forth. Again, there should there are and shouldn't be any surprises in here. Uh, and it's all very straightforward. I'm loving this. Sign me up, I'm converted.

This is the data that I've been no, I mean, and you know, I'm I'm being only mildly sarcastic. This is the data that I've been looking for that when we were switched from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, I lost the ease of use. Like the data exists somewhere, maybe in Google Analytics 4, but to take the time to figure it out, put the reports together, like all the things, I haven't had time to do that, and I know I'm not alone in that. And the questions that I'm asking are not complex questions. So, why does the answer have to be so complicated?

Why can't I just look at this? And the reason the solution is I'm just gonna start looking at this. It's for me, the ease of use is worth the potential like slightly different data quality from one system to the other, because this at least is more directional than I was getting before, because before I'm getting nothing. This gives me a sense of direction. Exactly.

So we go into acquisition. Where are we getting people from? So direct search uh searches, campaigns, social networks, and so on and so forth. We look at our all channels menu. Um one of the things that's interesting is that when you use UTM tracking codes, and by the way, out of the box, it is compatible with all Google Analytics UTM tracking.

So if you install this, you don't have to do anything extra, and it will vacuum up all those campaign codes. So here, uh in the last week, the almost the inbox insights newsletter was a big driver of acquisition for traffic to the site, the almost timely newsletter, my Substack account uh and things. You can see the referrals, what referring campaigns and where they're coming from. Social networks like LinkedIn, social networks like YouTube and so on and so forth. Uh, what other websites uh are sending us stuff.

So, like my website is in there, very straightforward. Um, the search engine, the keyword part, this part never works well anymore because that data is now lost, it's encrypted. This is also true in Google Analytics. If you go into Google Analytics, you will not see this information either. Uh, but your websites, what social networks we're getting our traffic from?

Hey, huge surprise. It's it's LinkedIn all the time because it's the last surviving social network that is in a dumpster fire. Yeah, I can't challenge that. Exactly. Although you will see threads is on there, which is coming up.

That's coming up. Uh, you will notice also what isn't on there that is the the network formerly known as Twitter. Um so you can again look at your campaigns. Uh, you can set up your own tracking codes. If you have e-commerce, your e-commerce data would be in here.

Uh, we don't have it integrated right now with our academy, but it was certainly something we could do. And then going going into the thing that matters the most goals, conversions, right? How many conversions? What was it worth? And what does it look like over time?

You can look at your conversions by channel, and then there's a whole bunch of submenus here. So I goals by search engine, right? How which search engines driving conversions? Um, goals by so the keyword I know does not work. Goals by website, which websites uh like there's the my sub stack, uh there's the almost timely newsletter that drives conversions.

Again, like you were saying, Katie, you don't need to go rooting around in Explore Hub for an hour. You can say, okay, I want to know where where's my conversions coming from. Yeah. It's this is so much more user-friendly. You know, if you're doing more complex analysis, exporting the data through the API and Google Analytics, that's fine.

But if you're someone like me who's not a power user and just has very general questions about the overall health of your website and your digital assets, this is great. Here's that question you keep asking me all the time. Hey, what pages on our website convert? Mm-hmm. There you go.

Amazing. And that and see, and this was my uh challenge. This has been my challenge. I know it's not a complicated question. Why is it so hard to get to an answer?

And boom, you hit a button, and there it is. Now, obviously, we have more goals to set up, but like there it is. That's all I want to know. Exactly. How long does it take someone to convert?

Those of you who remember Universal Analytics, this used to be one of the reports that we used to love to see, you know, are we a long sales cycle or a short sales cycle? We're a decently long sales cycle. Look at the for just the thank you page conversions. You're talking, there's a good chunk in here, 13% are 15 to 30 days, 9%, 31 to 60 days. So there's there's some slowness in that cycle.

And you can see by when you move the mouse, you get the nice little percentages that pop up there for each row. And that I mean, that's incredibly useful information that we've been missing for a while. Mm-hmm. Uh visits per conversion. How many times does it take someone to visit to convert?

So 40% of people do it, you know, first visit. But there's a whole bunch of people who would take a fifth or they're they're very indecisive. Also super helpful information because, you know, we can say, well, what pages are converting? So if someone, you know, we could I could look at that and go, oh, our brand awareness must be really good if someone knows exactly what they want to do. Um, you know, but it gives me more direction than I've been getting.

I feel like I've been kind of flying blind because the data that I can get out of Google Analytics 4 just isn't helpful. It's not what I need. This one's super powerful, device type. So you'll notice our desktop smartphone tablet. Um desktop conversion rate for this for the thank you page is 10%.

Smartphone conversion rate, 22%. That means that if our site uh thankfully it is in good condition from a mobile perspective, if it was not, we would be losing a crazy amount of conversions because more people convert on their smartphone on a percentage basis than they do on the desktop by double the amount. So our site has to be mobile friendly. Um, and just looking at this very quick report, we can go, wow, that's a big difference between um mobile versus desktop. So, what else can we do as marketers to make our site more mobile friendly or or more appealing to smartphones?

Clearly, they're already converting at quite a rate. Mm-hmm. And I remember this was an activity we went through when we redesigned the site of what was that mobile experience going to look like. And we were very we spent a long time on that experience. So I'm glad that it's paying off.

Exactly. I was looking at when feature phone. What the heck is a feature phone? Is that like a cricket? That's like the old Nokia.

Uh-huh. Okay. So technically not smart though. Yeah. And if you're converting on our website from our car browser, we need to have a talk about your life choices.

I was just gonna say that's an indicator of uh poor life decisions. Yeah, it's funny to see Fablets still out there, too. And in fact, even there are some Fablet users, which uh I have not seen anyone three of them. Whoever you three people are. I don't know what a Fablet is, but I also don't want to derail the conversation.

It's half phone, half tablet, so it's like a big phone, really. There used to be an iPad mini that was like this halfway between. Um, but yeah, so when we we even in here, like what are the browsers people are using? Um, Microsoft Edge, surprisingly, shows up, right? So if you are doing any kind of um uh you know optimization for specific browsers, you might want to know that.

So this is Matomo, it's pretty straightforward, right? Um, again, it's it's GA it's Google Analytics from 2015, except that it's got all the modern data in it, and the navigation's simple, it's easy, and it gets you fast answers. The attribution isn't great, we know that. Um, if you want great attribution, you have to do it uh from the database itself. But here's the the cool part that I personally like as a data nerd, and that um you absolutely positively you can do it sort of in Google Analytics for if you have the big query instance installed.

Of course, you're running up the bill uh every month to do that. When you install this, particularly if you install this on a WordPress site, you get access to the entire raw database. Every piece of information that you see in the Mitomo interface is in your SQL database. So if you have skilled data scientists on staff, you can go into any of those shards uh and say, okay, well, you know, here's all this information from Motomo that I can work with directly. I don't need uh, you know, you have control of that information.

Which means if you were to make a copy of your database, for example, you could go back and actually edit the data. So let's say you forgot to set up a goal, right? You could retroactively go back and change the data to say, okay, this was a goal, we just forgot to put it in as a goal. And so you could actually do that in the retroactive data, which you absolutely can never do with any kind of Google uh setup. I mean, I would love to do that because how long have we been running Matomo just in the background?

Um couple of years, I think. So I feel like it would be powerful insights for us to go back, add in the goals, like even just you know, the basic four or five goals that we care about. Thank you, page, um, newsletter subscription, um, contact us, etc. And see what we see, because that's the data I'm looking for. Like the any thank you page is fine, but it doesn't really tell me a lot because we have a lot of thank you pages on our site.

So to know specifically what people were doing would be really helpful. I stand corrected. It looks like we turned this on in February of 2020. That's about four years. Yeah, we have four years of data.

Yeah, that's a that's a decent amount of data to do some decision making with. So I think that our next uh when we have free time, we work on getting this all straightened out and set up because I'm looking at this as my new savior, and I'm gonna say, see you later, Google Analytics, you're not helpful to me. And and that is something that you know I think is a really important consideration. It's it's something for for everyone to think about is if you are if you're in marketing and you want convenient, fast, mostly correct answers that are directionally correct, you're gonna get them faster here than you are in Google Analytics. I'm raising my hand for that.

I want that. Well, and because you're always gonna run into questions of is the data accurate? How accurate is the data? You know, regardless of the system. And unless you are in the system, hand counting, you know, going outside of your website saying, Did you look at something?

Did you look at something? Like, it's impossible, like impossible to say that any website tracking data set is 100% accurate 100% of the time. These data sets should just be used as directional guidance to help you make better informed decisions, versus we got 30 conversions, our goal was 31, everybody's fired. Like you might have 31 conversions, but you need to look at other data sources. The whole point of these systems is just to give you the overall health of how things are working so that you can make better informed decisions and not go, you know, it's sunny today.

I think I'm going to do a campaign on rain clouds. I'm not going to consult any data. Yep. And I I had forgotten. We installed Matomo in early 2020 because Google had announced that GA4 was coming out.

And they were saying we're gonna, you know, this is gonna be the new way of things. And we knew looking at it, it was it was impressive, but it was also more complicated. So I we'd wanted to we set that up in 2020 because we wanted a backup system in case GA4 went sideways. Now, can Matomo connect to things like Looker Studio? Can you connect it to things like Google Search Console?

Like, what are those integrations? Like, what does it integrate with? What how can I use it as a stand-in for Google Analytics, or is it more complicated than that? You can absolutely use it as standard for Google Analytics in terms of other services it integrates with. It doesn't integrate out of the box with uh pretty much anything.

You have to look for plugins for those. It does not, for example, have any Search Console uh integration, uh, nor does it integrate with Google Ads and so on and so forth. It really is just a piece of web analytics software. Um, that said, if you wanted to pass data from it to other systems like a CRM, if you're doing good tagging and governance, that should be implicit anyway. So, for example, if you're using HubSpot and you're using good UTM tracking governance, HubSpot vacuums add up automatically.

You don't need to do an integration with your web analytics package to bring that data into HubSpot, it's there already. But what about like a Looker Studio? So you said there might be plugins to like integrate to basically put an interface on top of it because you still run into the challenge. Like, so for us, I have no problem going into the Mitomo system and looking for the data that I need, but that's not true of all teams, like they still have to put together some kind of more polished dashboard or reporting for executives to look at, you know. And so I guess my question is the reason people like Google Analytics is because of how it natively integrates with all of its other platforms, which makes sense, it's Google.

If we're encouraging people to look at alternatives, they still have those other pieces of the equation to consider, such as dashboards and uh search console and ads, you know. So, what do we advise them to do in that situation? If you were so here's the thing. If you have um it installed on your own hardware, you can connect, for example, you can connect Looker Studio straight to the SQL database, so you don't need to connect it to Matomo, you connect it to Matomo's backend database. Um that requires a bit more uh technical skill.

Um if you go into the Motomo plugins library, uh there are the ones that are blue cost money, the ones that are orange do not cost money, and there is pretty much a plugin for just about everything, including uh importing your Google Analytics data into Motomo, uh, which by the way is a great thing to do if you want to back up your old Universal Analytics account that's gonna go away uh this year. This is one of the best ways to do it. Uh and there's even if you wanted to, if you're so inclined, uh there is a chat GPT plugin that connects Motomo to chat GPT so that you can ask questions with Chat GPT of your Motomo instance. I saw um a Twilio SMS. Um, this is something John, uh, you like to experiment with SMS marketing.

So would this essentially bring that data into your Motomo instance in addition to because the SMS data lives outside of the website? Would that bring it into Motomo to further analyze? So this goes the opposite way. This allows you to connect Twilio to have Matomo text you. That's yeah, red alert.

Uh like, oh my god, buddy, you're in trouble. Texts, still important, yes, very important. If you're in a company where you know the board of directors will fire you if the site's down for more than an hour. That's yeah. There's the annotations, Katie, that you were asking about earlier.

There's a widget to add annotations. Yeah. Get your get your reports by email. Mm-hmm. So there's that there's all and these are all the ones that are free because they're there aren're orange instead of blue.

So yeah, there's there's so many different ways to extend the instance. I like it. I like I like it a lot, and I'm gonna spend some time learning more about Matomo so that I can be using it because I'm all for the ease of use. I mean, we're all busy, everybody has a lot of things on their plate, and the burden that Google Analytics for has given us to learn the new system is just too big. Uh that said, if you are someone who's like, yeah, this is all great, but I still have to do Google Analytics.

We do have a course, uh, which you can find at TrustInsights.ai slash G A4 course. Um, I believe it's seven or eight hours, um, self-paced, lots of modules. We go really deep into the technical pieces of how to set it up, how to use it. Um but if you're like, you know what, I just want to set up Matomo, I think it's great. I could use some help.

Trust insights.ai slash contact, John Wall, chief statistician, all around nice guy. So he's gonna walk you through it. He'll get you set up with some help. Um, yeah, I'm in. You you've sold me on it.

I mean, just seeing that the menus are labeled intuitively, like I'm in, that sold me. Doesn't take much. Exactly. So that is Matomo. I would encourage again if you work in a situation where you have a highly regulated environment, where you're where privacy is is mandated, where you want ease of use, where you want low cost, um, but uh but still flexibility.

It is a great piece of software to run in parallel with your existing analytics installation. Uh, I think that's a sensible thing for pretty much everyone to do it. But as as Katie is you know finding out, it might become your primary system because you can just get the information you need out of it faster. So, any parting thoughts? Make your life easier.

Exactly. All right, folks, that's gonna do it for this week's show. We will talk to you all next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it.

For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast. At our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.