Is Matomo Right For Me?

General questions
1

Hi

I am trying to figure out if Matomo is the right product for me, right now the site I look after uses google analytics and our homebrew tracking.

GA is for general tracking and the homebrew is to see what members/non members are actually doing. For instance if a user searchs for a product on the site that users information is logged with information of what they searched, what part of the site they are(this case “Search Area”)

GA can do this with custom events but they do not allow any identification data to be logged from the data, I know there are ways to get around that but none are ideal.

Does Matomo have the ability to track individual users via some custom events?

I also saw that Matomo has an api which is great, one future requirement is that people who are listing products on the site, want to track what people are searching, we want to give them a simplistic view so I was thinking if Matomo exposes an api, I could search for a certain criteria and then generate some custom charts and stats page for those users.

Is that possible?

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2

Hi,

All of what you mentioned should be possible with Matomo. A few keywords:

  • Normal page tracking (as in GA)
  • Custom Dimentions: they allow you to store custom data either to a visit or a page
  • Event Tracking: this allows you to track when something happens (e.g. in a JS function)
  • Segmentation: You can filter by everything and create all reports (preprocessed) with this filter applied.
  • API Segmentation (not related to the former): this allows you to filter every API request by any dynamic expression. (which of course has a worse performance)

User guides: User guides Archive - Analytics Platform - Matomo
Developer Documentation: https://developer.matomo.org/

I hope this helps you to get started with Matomo

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3

Cool, I will have to look into all those sections.

I see you can put in the UserId, what hooks up different devices to the same account, though in the documentation it says that if they log in simultaneously it is treated as one visit, is there some way to break that up as one metric I would like to track is if these people are sharing accounts.

Of course people could have 2 browsers open at the same time and be logged in, but if someone is in 1 desktop logged in and then logs into another desktop 5miles away, that could be strong indicator they are sharing.

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