I’ve been using Matomo (provided by my shared hosting provider) for some time now. Currently it’s version is 3.5.1. I’m also using WP-Matomo (WP-Piwik) WordPress plugin.
I noticed huge discrepancies between numbers reported by Google Analytics and Matomo. For example, over the same relatively short period of time, Matomo reports 80000 pageviews while GA only 10000.
Difference that large makes me think one of the tools is totally unreliable — but which one is it?
I’d be very thankful for any help. My website URL, if that helps, is https://typeofweb.com/
One thing that is confusing me on your website is the service worker that is intercepting all requests on your websites and using fetch to make http requests. Oddly the piwik.js and piwik.php requests show up twice in the firefox developer tools network tab.
I’m not sure if that is the reason, but maybe that is causing issues in some browsers.
Thank you for your reply! I have disabled service-worker caching for any cross-origin requests now and we’ll see if that fixes it.
However, that could account for more or less twice the number of pageviews — while in fact, I’m getting 8x the numbers when compared to Google Analytics.
I notice on the newer Fire Fox browsers that they automatically block google analytics out-of-the-box. However, my analytics share the same domain, and are passed-through. However, most of the time, my analytics show lower than google’s. I have hand-implemented some as well - such as capturing outgoing clicks that refused to work within Matomo. Another thing I noticed is that GA seems to be blocking, or close to it. Performance is remarkably better when I turn it off. However, I leave it on, as we don’t want to lower our SEO ranking. We don’t know if GA feeds into Google, but we suspect it does.
Honestly I seriously doubt Google would do this as in that case they would very quickly have to fight tons of lawsuits for antitrust violations as they would abuse their power in one field of business to influence another business part of theirs.