Matomo is an open-source Google Analytics software. Let’s learn how to install this self-hosted and rich-featured web analytics software on WordPress.
Overview
Do you have a WordPress website up & running? Are you looking to track and analyze important data insights of your website? This is the right place you have come to where we are going to install Matomo for WordPress. There are millions of individual and business websites that are backed by WordPress. It is due to certain important factors that WordPress offers such as efficiency, robustness, a rich stack of plugins, and much more. On the other hand, it is the most important job to keep an eye on the website’s overall performance. Therefore, there are many web analytics software such as Google Analytics Tool, ahrefs.com, and many more. These tools provide a wide range of features that assist webmasters to track and analyze important data chunks. In fact, these tools are not too easy to understand and come with complex working models.
However, the open source community has developed some web analytics software that offer similar features but in easy and straight behavior. Matomo is one of those open source BI solutions that provide vital website insights. In this blog post, we will install Matomo for WordPress by covering the following points.
What is Matomo?
Matomo is a free and open source business intelligence software. It is highly customizable and comes with self-hosting capabilities. Further, Matomo lets site owners add unlimited users and websites and gives utmost privacy, data integrity, and control. It has an intuitive dashboard that shows comprehensive information about visitors, location, and demographics. This web analytics software offers many powerful features that include data privacy, customizable dashboard, and lets users import data from Google Analytics. In addition, this open source web analytics software is compliant with GDPR and CNIL. Further, this free BI solution is written in PHP and JavaScript. Moreover, users can find all the documentation regarding development and deployment. Additionally, users can find the source code files on Github.
Installation steps of Matomo for WordPress
In this section, we will look into the installation steps of Matomo for WordPress. In fact, this open source blogging platform has a very vibrant and active developer community that has developed a number of powerful features to meet user requirements. So, you can find the Matomo plugin easily by going into the plugin pool of WordPress. Therefore, it is good enough if you have set up WordPress. Otherwise, you can follow the instructions given in this link to install and set up WordPress. Firstly, open your WordPress dashboard, go to the Plugins, and hit the “Add New” button.
Now, go into the search bar and look for “Matomo” and you will find the Matomo Analytics plugin as shown in the image below.
Next, install this plugin and press activate to activate it to use it further. This is the time to configure the Matomo plugin so click on this newly installed plugin and press the button “Enable tracking” shown in the image below.
The beauty of WordPress is that it communicates with the Matomo plugin seamlessly through APIs. This open source web analytics software provides the tracking code just like Google Analytics. Therefore, you do not need to insert the tracking code manually rather it happens automatically. Finally, the Matomo plugin is installed and set up on WordPress and you can start tracking your business website data.
Matomo Dashboard
This WordPress tutorial has described the integration of the open source Matomo plugin. Now, let’s explore its dashboard that provides powerful modules. Under the Matomo Analytics menu, click the “Reporting” option that will take you to the Matomo dashboard of your website as shown in the image below.
Here, you can see the Matomo dashboard that has modules on the left-hand side such as Visitors, Behaviour, Acquisition, Ecommerce, and Goals. There are many widgets that display user visits data over a certain period of time. Moreover, you can filter the data by applying date filters shown on the top of the dashboard. Further, if you click the Visitors option, you will see many options where you can see different data sources such as Real-time, Locations, Devices, Times, and many more. Similarly, you can see many options in the Behaviour tab that include pages, Entry Pages, Exit pages and some more. Basically, this tab gives you an idea of the visitor’s behavior towards your website.
Just like Google Analytics, there is an Acquisition option that gives an overall idea of traffic from various sources and social platforms. Additionally, you can track and analyze your campaigns. Anyways, you can explore all the features by yourself. It is quite user-friendly and easy to work with if you have little experience of working with Google Analytics. The real beauty of open source software is that you can extend it as per your needs. So, there is always a window for extension or modification in the Matomo plugin.
Conclusion
This brings us to the end of this WordPress tutorial blog post. In this article, we have gone through the two most widely used open source software WordPress and Matomo. We learned the installation process of Matomo for WordPress and looked into the features. This open Matomo plugin shows the data visually with the help of filters that save immense time. This blog post will really help you if you are looking to install a web analytics software for your business website. You can find further options and links in the Explore section below.
Finally, containerize.com is writing articles on further open source products. Therefore, please stay in touch with the [Blogging]11 and Business Intelligence Software categories for regular news and updates.