Softaculous Spotlight #1: Matomo

Analytics you actually own, no Google required

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When Google Analytics 4 launched a few years ago, it was pitched as the next big thing in digital measurement. For many site owners, the reality has been a bit of a headache. The interface was torn down and rebuilt into something far less intuitive, turning what used to be simple reporting tasks into a steep learning curve.

Beyond the usability issues, handing over every detail of your audience’s behavior to a massive third party is a tradeoff that feels increasingly hard to justify. People were looking for a low friction way to get back to a Universal Analytics style without the baggage. Enter Matomo.

Matomo is a full-featured web analytics platform that runs entirely on your own server. Everything your visitors do gets logged to your database, processed on your hardware, and displayed in your dashboard. No third party sees it. No algorithm samples it. No account suspension wipes it. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with your own data.

What is Matomo?

Matomo (formerly Piwik, which you may remember from the early 2010s) has been around since 2007 and now powers analytics for a growing number of websites worldwide. It is increasingly popular among companies that value granular control over their analytics or cannot send visitor data to US-based advertising companies.

The core product is entirely open-source and free. You install it on your hosting account much like you’d install WordPress, configure a tracking snippet on your site, and within minutes you have a dashboard showing real-time visitors, traffic sources, page performance, and much more. By default only you have access to this analytic data, and it never leaves your server.

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Who Should Be Using Matomo?

Matomo is genuinely useful for a wide range of site owners, but it particularly shines in a few specific situations:

The Privacy-Conscious Publisher. If you cover politics, health, or personal finance, your audience values discretion. Using Google Analytics effectively tells every visitor that their reading habits are being piped into a massive advertising network. Matomo lets you be honest with your readers: you track the stats, the data stays on your server, and no one else ever sees it.

The EU-Based Business. Navigating GDPR with GA4 is a legal minefield that requires Data Processing Agreements and complex consent platforms and even then, its legality is often debated. Matomo’s cookie-less mode sidesteps the bulk of this headache. For an EU-based business, this isn’t just a technical preference; it’s a significant time-saver and a safeguard against legal liability.

Marketers With Tech Saavy Audiences. A growing number of users rely on browsers, extensions, or network-level DNS filters specifically designed to block known tracking scripts. Because Matomo is self-hosted on your own domain, your tracking is far less likely to be flagged or blocked by default compared to major third-party platforms.

The Agency. If you manage a portfolio of clients, you can track all of them from a single Matomo instance. You can give clients access only to their specific sites, white-label the dashboard, and provide reports that don’t require them to log into a Google account. It makes the analytics feel like a part of your premium service rather than a third-party add-on.

The Serious E-commerce Store. Matomo’s e-commerce tracking is surprisingly robust right out of the box. You get revenue data, product performance, and cart abandonment funnels without the finicky data layer configurations often required by Google Tag Manager. On Matomo, turning on these advanced insights is usually just a checkbox away.

The Developer Who Wants Total Control. Matomo offers a comprehensive REST API, letting you pull data programmatically for custom dashboards or internal tools. Since the data lives in your own MySQL database, you also have the freedom to query the tables directly if you need to build something truly custom.

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Matomo vs. Google Analytics 4

How does Matomo actually stack up against GA4?

Feature	Matomo (Self-Hosted)	Google Analytics 4
Data Ownership	100% Yours	Google’s
GDPR Compliance	Cookie-less mode available	Requires heavy configuration
Data Sampling	None, 100% accurate	Yes, on high-traffic sites
Real-Time Visitors	Yes	Yes (30-min delay on some reports)
E-commerce Tracking	Built-in	Requires GA4 + GTM setup
Heatmaps	Paid plugin available	No
Session Recordings	Paid plugin available	Requires third-party tool
API Access	Full REST API	Limited
Learning Curve	Familiar / Intuitive	Steep
Cost	Free (hosting only)	Free (pay with data)

The honest answer: GA4 has advantages if you’re heavily invested in the Google advertising ecosystem… specifically for Google Ads attribution or a data processing integration with Looker Studio. For everyone else, Matomo is competitive on features and wins decisively on data ownership, privacy, and usability.

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Features Worth Getting Excited About

Matomo is more than just a visitor counter, here are some cool features.

100% Accurate Data. GA4 uses data sampling on free accounts above certain traffic thresholds - meaning the numbers you see are a “best guess” and not what your actual traffic is. Matomo never samples. Every hit is counted.

Heatmaps & Session Recordings. Matomo’s Heatmap and Session Recording plugins (available via a free trial, then $259/year) allow you to visualize exactly where visitors click and how far they scroll, or watch anonymized recordings of their actual sessions. This level of insight is invaluable for identifying friction points on your site without the need for expensive manual usability audits. While third-party services like Hotjar often start at $40/month (roughly $480/year) for similar features, Matomo offers a more integrated and cost-effective way to get the same results.

Goals & Conversion Funnels. Define any action as a Goal: a form submission, a file download, a button click, a certain page visit, and track how well your site is converting. The funnel visualization shows exactly where visitors drop off in multi-step flows.

A/B Testing. Matomo includes a built-in A/B testing engine. Run experiments on headlines, layouts, or CTAs without connecting any third-party tool.

Ecommerce Analytics. Revenue tracking, average order value, product performance, and abandoned cart analysis are all available with a few lines of tracking code. WooCommerce and Shopify plugins make setup even simpler.

Import from Google Analytics. You can pull in your legacy Google Analytics data using a plugin. This removes one of the big friction points with switching out your analytics provider.

Mobile App. There are official Android and IOS apps. They’ll make you wish you were on PC, but they are great for checking numbers quickly on the go.

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The Honest Pros & Cons

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Performance & System Requirements

Matomo is surprisingly efficient for what it does. The tracking script loaded on your website is tiny and non-blocking. The heavier work like processing and report generation happens on your server, which is why choosing the right hosting environment matters.

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NEW

Full Matomo Setup Guide

Want the complete step-by-step install guide with screenshots?

View Install Guide →

How to Install Matomo on Your Hawk Host Account

Five steps from zero to a running analytics dashboard

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Your First 5 Minutes Inside Matomo

The dashboard will prompt you to add your first website and get your tracking code. Here’s what to do in order

1. Add your site. Go to Settings → Websites → Add a new website. Enter your site’s name and URL. Matomo will generate a unique Site ID and tracking snippet.

2. Install the tracking code. Paste the JavaScript snippet into the <head> section of your site. If you’re on WordPress, the Matomo WordPress plugin handles this automatically, no code editing required.

3. Set up the Archive Reports cron job. This is the one technical step that trips people up. Go to Settings → System Check → Archive Reports. Matomo will show you the exact cron command to add. Without this, reports update on demand, meaning it wont start to process your visitor’s data until you visit the Matomo backend. Add the command via cPanel’s Cron Jobs interface.

4. Configure privacy settings. Go to Settings → Privacy. Enable IP anonymization (last 2 octets), enable the cookie-less tracking mode if you want to avoid consent banners, and turn on Do Not Track support. These three settings take 30 seconds and dramatically improve your privacy posture.

5. Verify tracking is working. Visit your website in a browser, then check the Real-Time dashboard in Matomo. You should see yourself appear within a few seconds.

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Tips, Tricks & Hidden Gems

A few things that aren’t obvious but are worth knowing

Tag Manager is built in. Matomo includes its own Tag Manager (under Tag Manager in the menu), so you can manage multiple tracking tags without exposing your site to Google Tag Manager.

The Transitions report is excellent. Click any page in the Pages report, then click “Transitions.” It shows a nice looking Sankey-style diagram of exactly where visitors came from before that page and where they went next. This lets you easily visualize your average users journey at a glance.

Scheduled reports via email. Go to Email Reports and set up automated PDF or HTML summaries delivered to your inbox (or your client’s inbox) on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. Great for agencies who want to give clients visibility without a login.

Segment your audience. Matomo’s segmentation is powerful. Slice your data by country, device type, traffic source, or any custom dimension. Segments can be saved and applied across all reports.

Log Import if you want historical data without JavaScript. If you have web server access logs (Apache/Nginx), Matomo includes a Log Analytics script that can import them. This means you can track page views even for visitors who have JavaScript disabled.

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Which Hosting Plan Do You Need?

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Matomo has been around for nearly 20 years for a reason. It’s a genuinely excellent analytics platform that happens to also respect your users’ privacy and give you complete control over your data. The fact that it’s free is icing on the cake.

If you’ve been on the fence about moving away from Google Analytics, this is a good time to try. Install it on a subdomain, run it alongside GA4 for a month and see how it works out for you!

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