The Big Course about Matomo Analytics

Define web analytics through qualitative and quantitative data and competitive analysis to improve the online experience, and explore Matomo as a free analytics solution with plugins and privacy considerations.

Explore the four freedoms of free software, and how Matomo offers a privacy-minded, open-source alternative to Google Analytics. Learn how individuals and businesses can use, modify, and contribute to Matomo.

Learn how to install Matomo on your local machine for testing, including downloading the software, creating a local database with MySQL or MariaDB, configuring permissions, and deploying the tracking code.

Defines a measurement plan as a multi-document spec for a web analytics project, detailing roles via the Raci method, data collection, event tracking, and quality assessment.

Take a guided tour of Matomo analytics, learning how to access an instance, customize dashboards, navigate reports by visitors, behavior, and acquisition, and manage admin settings.

Explore how segments filter Matomo's audience to analyze specific groups. Create and test segments by selecting conditions, naming them, and comparing segments across websites for real-time insights.

Explore how Matomo dashboards organize your favorite reports and customize widgets, layouts, and time periods. Create custom reports, use plugins, and apply segments to tailor insights.

Learn how events in Matomo track user interactions beyond page views using custom tracking code, category, action, name, and value, with tag manager setup and debugging.

Learn to define and manage goals in Matomo, including automatic conditions and manual goals, with a contact form example, tag manager configuration, and goal reports.

Discover how custom dimensions extend analytics by adding categories like page category or author, define at action or visit level, and implement with admin settings, URL extraction, and tag manager.

Use the Matomo campaign URL builder to customize links for campaigns across QR codes, PDFs, emails, and social posts, and track visits by campaign name to analyze ROI.

Discover how the custom alerts plugin in Matomo Analytics enables threshold-based email alerts for specific reports, with daily, weekly, or monthly schedules, including self-hosted installation considerations.

Coordinate with developers to implement Matomo e-commerce tracking, capture order data (sku, name, category, price, quantity, shipping, tax) via the data layer, and review the e-commerce log for accuracy.

Explore how the heartbeat feature updates time spent on the last page by pushing a timer at a threshold, typically 30 seconds, with options to adjust.

Learn how annotations in Matomo let teams add date-stamped notes to a website, visible on graphs and shared among users. Create annotations by selecting a date and describing events.

Implement content tracking with Matomo by adding tracking code and data attributes to content pieces, capturing display and click counts to compare performance while mindful of database load.

Learn how to set up and customize Matomo email reports, including scheduling, segments, formats (html, pdf, csv, tsv), and creating custom reports for agencies.

Explore how Matomo uses a user ID to unify visits from different browsers under one person, beyond cookie-based identification, by implementing a unique identifier via registration system and tracking code.

Discover Matomo's community plugins, freely licensed and marketplace-listed; there are many across tracking, configuration, data visualization, reporting, widgets, and API. Install at your own risk, since not all are audited.

Explore premium features in Matomo analytics, comparing community plugins with premium contracts, priced by user count and renewed annually; activate licenses via shop.matomo.org and note features disable if not renewed.

Learn to create and customize Matomo reports beyond the default, naming, describing, selecting dimensions and metrics, and choosing table or graph views for dashboards and emails.

Learn to use the white label plugin to replace Matomo with your company name, customize header colors, hide marketplace, rename the tracking code, and remove matomo.org links.

Discover how the advertising conversion export plugin in Matomo automatically matches campaign traffic and exports conversions for Google ads, Bing ads, and Yandex ads.

Analyze your site's technical seo using seo web vitals and Google PageSpeed via Matomo, audit competitors, compare page performance, and leverage metrics for custom alerts.

Track embedded videos and audio across your site with the media analytics premium feature, automatically recognizing YouTube and Vimeo players and revealing impressions, play rate, and time spent.

Learn how to configure heatmaps and session recording in Matomo Analytics to visualize click coordinates, mouse movement, and user sessions as video with privacy masking and sampling options.

Explore cohorts data visualization and report visualizations to measure retention by tracking visitors from day zero and see how many return over time.

Learn how single sign-on links Matamo to an identity provider like OneLogin or Okta, enabling a single login for all services, with admin configurations and a SAML login button.

Explore the Matomo search engine keywords performance plugin that exports and imports data from major search engines to analyze combined keywords and metrics like clicks, impressions, ctr, and position.

Explore how funnels map end user steps from defined goals to final conversion, using a visualization that tracks visits, exits, and conversions across each step.

Explore the activity log premium feature, accessible to super users via cogwheel > diagnostic, to troubleshoot your Matomo installation, see who did what and why, including GDPR concerns.

Explore AB testing in Matomo: compare two content versions across websites or emails, set audience conditions, define success metrics, and determine a winner.

Explore the premium roll-up feature in Matomo to aggregate data across apps and websites. Create a new measurable, select the apps you want, and view unified data as it flows.

Learn how Matomo's form analytics automatically recognizes HTML forms on your site, measure form performance, track submissions, views, and drop-offs, and pinpoint which fields drive user interactions, saving you time.

Install and enable the Matomo user flow premium feature to visualize the full visitor path without coding. View end-to-end paths and switch between page URL and page title.

Explore how the multi-channel conversion attribution feature in Matomo Analytics visualizes attribution models from referrer cookies, showing how first interactions and later channels affect conversions in e-commerce or goals reports.

Install and configure the WooCommerce Analytics plugin for Matomo. Purchase a license, upload and activate it in WordPress, then enter the Matomo URL, site ID, and authentication token.

Set up a Matomo plugin development environment and use the console to create a plugin, enable development mode, and customize its style sheets and colors.