Hi, like a lot of people, I’m a new user of Matomo. I’ve had Matomo setup on an individual, self-hosted server for several months now to let it collect data and then compare it with GA. On our sites, we have a very compliant Opt-In model, where new users are delivered a mandatory interaction Consent form, asking them simply to either “Accept Cookies” or “Deny Cookies”, and we respect that.
As one can expect, doing so made us lose a lot of “trackable” traffic, thus why we created a cookie-less Matomo solution to make up the difference that we lost in GA.
We expected to see a huge difference in the number of sessions between the two platforms, and we did; around 122% difference. But what doesn’t make sense, is that the difference in Page Views is leaning in favour of GA? I don’t understand how we could have substantially higher sessions recorded in Matomo, but significantly less page views?
I extracted a full list from both platforms of all pages and the number of page views to them, and the only page that Matomo records more page views on, is the home page. Every other page after that, GA records substantially more.
Any ideas why this might be the case? Or any tips in helping me diagnose this? And final quick question; we have a Matomo cookie-less solution at the moment. If I wanted to use tag manager in Matomo, would that then drop a cookie on the user?