Ditch Google Analytics: Self-Hosted Matomo

Google Analytics is the default choice for website analytics, but it comes with significant trade-offs. Your data lives on Google's servers, your visitors are tracked by Google's cookies, and Google uses that data for its own advertising business. Matomo offers the same depth of analytics: page views, visitor locations, referral sources, goals, e-commerce tracking: on your own server, with no third party accessing your data.

What Matomo Tracks

Matomo covers everything Google Analytics does and more. Real-time visitor logs show who is on your site right now. Visit profiles track individual visitor journeys across multiple sessions. Goal conversion tracking measures how many visitors complete your desired actions: purchases, sign-ups, downloads. E-commerce tracking follows products from listing view to cart to purchase. Event tracking captures button clicks, form submissions, and video plays. Campaign tracking attributes conversions to specific marketing channels.

Matomo also supports heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing, form analytics, and media analytics through premium plugins. The core analytics are free and open-source. The premium plugins are one-time purchases, not subscriptions.

Why Self-Host Your Analytics

Google Analytics processes your data on Google's infrastructure and uses it to improve Google's advertising products. If you are uncomfortable with that arrangement, self-hosting Matomo is the only alternative that gives you comparable analytics depth. Heatmaps and session recordings that capture every mouse movement and click on your pages stay on your server, not on a third-party cloud.

Matomo has built-in GDPR compliance tools: IP anonymization, cookie consent integration, opt-out iframe, and data retention controls. Deploy on a VPS with 2GB RAM and MySQL or MariaDB. It runs on PHP and deploys in under ten minutes with the web installer.

VPS1 deploys Matomo with SSL, automated database backups, and privacy configuration. See details on our Matomo software page.