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• Top Conversion Metrics to Track in 2024

  22 janvier 2024, par Erin

  2023 boasts  2.64 billion online shoppers worldwide ; that’s more than a third of the global population. With these numbers on an upward trajectory in 2024, conversion metrics are more important than ever to help marketers optimise the online shopping experience. 

  In this article, we’ll provide predictions for the most important conversion metrics you should keep track of in 2024. We’ll also examine how social media can make or break your brand engagement strategy. Keep reading to stay ahead of the competition for 2024 and gain tips and tricks for improving conversion performance.

  What are conversion metrics ?

  In technical terms, conversion metrics are the quantifiable measurements used to track the success of specific outcomes on a website or marketing campaign. Conversion metrics demonstrate how well your website prompts visitors to take desirable actions, like signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or filling out a form, for instance.

  Let’s say you’re running a lemonade stand, and you want to compare the number of cups sold to the number of people who approached your stand (your conversion rate). This ratio of cups sold to the total number of people can help you reassess your sales approach. If the ratio is low, you might reconsider your approach ; if it’s high, you can analyse what makes your technique successful and double down.

  

  In 2023, we saw the average conversion rate for online shopping grow by 5.53% compared to the previous year. An increase in conversion rate typically indicates a higher percentage of website visitors converting to buyers. It can also be a good sign for marketing teams that marketing campaigns are more effective, and website experiences are more user-friendly than the previous year. 

  Conversion metrics are a marketers’ bread and butter. Whether it’s through measuring the efficacy of campaigns, honing in on the most effective marketing channels or understanding customer behaviour — don’t underestimate the power of conversion metrics. 

  Conversion rate vs. conversion value 

  Before we dive into the top conversion metrics to track in 2024, let’s clear up any confusion about the difference between conversion rate and conversion value. Conversion rate is a metric that measures the ratio of website visitors/users who complete a conversion action to the total number of website visitors/users. Conversion rates are communicated as percentages.

  A conversion action can mean many different things depending on your product or service. Some examples of conversion actions that website visitors can take include : 

  • Making a purchase
  • Filling out a form
  • Subscribing to a newsletter
  • Any other predefined goal

  Conversion rate is arguably one of the most valuable conversion metrics if you want to pinpoint areas for improvement in your marketing strategy and user experience (UX).

  A good conversion rate completely depends on the type of conversion being measured. Shopify has reported that the average e-commerce conversion rate will be 2.5%-3% in 2023, so if you fall anywhere in this range, you’re in good shape. Below is a visual aid for how you can calculate conversion rate depending on which conversion actions you decide to track :

  

  Conversion value is also a quantifiable metric, but there’s a key difference : conversion value assigns a numerical value to each conversion based on the monetary value of the completed conversion action. Conversion value is not calculated with a formula but is assigned based on revenue generated from the conversion. Conversion value is important for calculating marketing efforts’ return on investment (ROI) and is often used to allocate marketing budgets better. 

  Both conversion rate and conversion value are vital metrics in digital marketing. When used in tandem, they can provide a holistic perspective on your marketing efforts’ financial impact and success. 

  9 important conversion metrics to track in 2024

  Based on research and results from 2023, we have compiled this list of predictions for the most important metrics to track in 2024. 

  

  1. Conversion rate 

  To start things out strong, we’ve got the timeless and indispensable conversion rate. As we discussed in the previous section, conversion rate measures how successfully your website convinces visitors to take important actions, like making purchases or signing up for newsletters. 

  An easy-to-use web analytics solution like Matomo can help in tracking conversion rates. Matomo automatically calculates conversion rates of individual pages, overall website and on a goal-by-goal basis. So you can compare the conversion rate of your newsletter sign up goal vs a form submission goal on your site and see what is underperforming and requires improvement.

  

  In the example above in Matomo, it’s clear that our goal of getting users to comment is not doing well, with only a 0.03% conversion rate. To improve our website’s overall conversion rate, we should focus our efforts on improving the user commenting experience.

  For 2024, we predict that the conversion rate will be just as important to track as in 2023. 

  2. Average visit duration

  This key metric tracks how long users spend on your website. A session typically starts when a user lands on your website and ends when they close the browser or have been inactive for some time ( 30 minutes). Tracking the average visit duration can help you determine how well your content captures users’ attention or how engaged users are when navigating your website. 

  Average Visit Duration = Total Time Spent / Number of Visits

  

  Web analytics tools like Matomo help in monitoring conversion rate metrics like average visit duration. Timestamps are assigned to each interaction within a visit, so that average visit duration can be calculated. Analysing website visit information like average visit duration allows you to evaluate the relevance of your content with your target audience. 

  3. Starter rate

  If your business relies on getting leads through forms, paying attention to Form Analytics is crucial for improving conversion rates. The “starter rate” metric is particularly important—it indicates the number of who people start filling out the form, after seeing it. 

  When you’re working to increase conversion rates and capture more leads, keeping an eye on the starter rate helps you understand where users might encounter issues or lose interest early in the form-filling process. Addressing these issues can simplify the form-filling experience and increase the likelihood of successful lead captures.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  Concrete CMS tripled their leads using Form Analytics in Matomo—see how in their case study.

  4. Bounce rate

  Bounce rate reflects the percentage of visitors who exit your site after interacting with a single page. Bounce rate is an important metric for understanding how relevant your content is to visitors or how optimised your user experience is. A high bounce rate can indicate that visitors are having trouble navigating your website or not finding what they’re looking for. 

  Matomo automatically calculates bounce rate on each page and for your overall website.

  

  Bounce Rate = (# of Single-Page Sessions / Total # of Sessions) * 100

  5. Cost-per-conversion

  This metric quantifies the average cost incurred for each conversion action (i.e., sale, acquired lead, sign-up, etc.). Marketers use cost-per-conversion to assess the cost efficiency of a marketing campaign. You want to aim for a lower cost-per-conversion, meaning your advertising efforts aren’t breaking the bank. A high cost-per-conversion could be acceptable in luxury industries, but it often indicates a low marketing ROI. 

  Cost-per-Conversion = Ad Spend / # of Conversions

  By connecting your Matomo with Google Ads through Advertising Conversion Export feature in Matomo, you can keep tabs on your conversions right within the advertising platform. This feature also works with Microsoft Advertising and Yandex Ads.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  6. Average order value (AOV)

  AOV is a conversion metric that calculates the average monetary value of each order. AOV is crucial for helping e-commerce businesses understand the value of their transactions. A high AOV means buyers spend more per transaction and could be more easily influenced by upselling or cross-selling. Low AOV isn’t necessarily bad — you can compensate for a low AOV by boosting transaction volume. 

  

  AOV = Total Revenue / Total # of Orders 

  Matomo automatically tracks important e-commerce metrics such as AOV, the percentage of visits with abandoned carts and the conversion rate for e-commerce orders.

  7. Exit rate

  Exit rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave a specific webpage after viewing it. Exit rate differs from bounce rate in that it focuses on the last page visitors view before leaving the site. A high exit rate should be examined to identify issues with visitors abandoning the specific page. 

  Exit Rate = (# of Exits from a Page / Total # of Pageviews for that Page) * 100

  

  In the Matomo report above, it’s clear that 77% of visits to the diving page ended after viewing it (exit rate), while 23% continued exploring. 

  On the other hand, our products page shows a lower exit rate at 36%, suggesting that more visitors continue navigating through the site after checking out the products.

  How to improve your conversion performance 

  If you’re curious about improving your conversion performance, this section is designed to guide you through that exact process.

  

  Understand your target audience and their behaviour

  You may need to return to the drawing board if you’re noticing high bounce rates or a lack of brand engagement. In-depth audience analysis can unveil user demographics, preferences and behaviours. This type of user data is crucial for building user personas, segmenting your visitors and targeting marketing campaigns accordingly.

  You can segment your website visitors in a number of web analytics solutions, but for the example below, we’ll look at segmenting in Matomo. 

  

  In this instance, we’ve segmented visitors by mobile users. This helps us see how mobile users are doing with our newsletter signup goal and identify the countries where they convert the most. It also shows how well mobile users are doing with our conversion goal over time.

  It’s clear that our mobile users are converting at a very low rate—just 0.01%. This suggests there’s room for improvement in the mobile experience on our site.

  Optimise website design, landing pages, page loading speed and UX

  A slow page loading speed can result in high exit rates, user dissatisfaction and lost revenue. Advanced web analytics solutions like Matomo, which provides heatmaps and session recordings, can help you find problems in your website design and understand how users interact with it.

  Making a website that focuses on users and has an easy-to-follow layout will make the user experience smooth and enjoyable.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  Create compelling calls-to-action (CTA)

  Research shows that a strategically placed and relevant CTA can significantly increase your revenue. CTAs guide prospects toward conversion and must have a compelling and clear message. 

  You can optimise CTAs by analysing how users interact with them — this helps you tailor them to better resonate with your target audience. 

  A/B testing

  A/B testing can improve your conversion performance by allowing you to experiment with different versions of a web page. By comparing the impact of different web page elements on conversions, you can optimise your website with confidence. 

  Key conversion metrics takeaways

  Whether understanding user behaviour to develop a more intuitive user experience or guessing which marketing channel is the most effective, conversion metrics can be a marketer’s best friend. Conversion metrics help you save time, money and headaches when making your campaigns and website as effective as possible. 

  Make improving conversion rates easier with Matomo, a user-friendly all-in-one solution. Matomo ensures reliable insights by delivering accurate data while prioritising compliance and privacy.

  Get quality insights from your conversion metrics by trying Matomo free for 21 days. No credit card required.

• 8 Best Tools to Analyse Website Traffic

  12 septembre 2023, par Erin — Analytics Tips, Marketing

  Do you want to analyse your website traffic ?

  Maybe you want to know how well you’re converting your traffic. Or maybe you’re looking to track the performance and ROI of your marketing campaigns. Regardless, you won’t get far without relying on a dependable web traffic analysis platform.

  In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the top web analytics tools available (including the pricing for each one).

  Let’s dive in.

  What is website traffic analysis ?

  Curious about what it means to analyse website traffic ?

  

  Simply put, it involves collecting and examining data about your website visitors and the actions they take. Marketers, analysts and website owners can then take this data and use it to optimise their strategy to improve site traffic, conversion rates and ROI.

  A website analytics tool is software that tracks and measures various visitor activities and behaviours on your website. Common metrics include pageviews, traffic source, bounce rate and average time on page. Using a web analytics solution can give you insights into what’s working (and what’s not working) so you can optimise your website, campaigns or marketing strategy.

  Advantages of using a website traffic analysis tool

  1. Performance measurement and optimisation

  Tracking the success of your marketing efforts is a challenging task. The primary benefit of using a web analytics tool is implementing effective performance measurement. If you don’t know how to measure your efforts, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not with your campaigns and content. 

  A web analysis tool can give you the insights you need to understand whether your marketing initiatives have been successful or if they need to be improved.

  For instance, your new web design facelift may seem beautiful, but if visitors aren’t staying on your site as long and it is resulting in lower conversions, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

  2. Audience insights to improve the user experience

  Web traffic analysis platforms don’t just show you what your visitors are doing. It shows you who your audience is. A powerful website analytics tool will give you in-depth audience data, including demographics like geographical location (e.g., city, state or country), to help you better understand your audience.

  Additionally, you can learn more about your audience by seeing how they interact with different content on your site. You’ll start to see that certain content performs better than others, giving you a greater understanding of your audience’s needs and wants. This means you’ll be able to tailor your website content and marketing efforts to your audience to improve the overall user experience.

  3. Improve SEO

  In the first two advantages, we touched on how insights can help you craft better content for the visitors already coming to your site to improve the user experience and improve conversions. But did you know that using a website analytics tool can also help improve how much traffic you’re getting to your site ?

  Since a web analytics tool can help you craft better content, one side effect is an increase in traffic from organic search through SEO. Additionally, your platform will likely show you other traffic sources that your visitors are coming from (i.e., another website is referring traffic to you) so you can tap into those high-performing sources and optimise your incoming traffic over time.

  Top 8 Tools to Analyse Website Traffic

  Here’s a breakdown of the top eight web analytics platforms to help you analyse each tool’s unique features, price, advantages and disadvantages so you can make the best decision.

  1. Matomo

  Matomo is an open-source website analytics tool that’s focused on protecting user privacy and data while offering robust insights into your web traffic. It’s one of the most powerful tools to track the entire customer journey on your site.

  

  Why Matomo : As the leader in open-source, privacy-friendly and ethical web analytics, Matomo is trusted by more than 1 million websites, including NASA, the United Nations and the European Commission.

  Matomo plays well with Google Analytics to track your websites by filling in the gaps where Google Analytics has limitations (i.e., cookie consent banner requirement). Matomo combines traditional and behavioural web analytics for deeper insights while ensuring compliance with the strictest privacy regulations like GDPR, LGPD and HIPAA.

  Matomo Standout Features and Integrations :

  Standout features include comprehensive visitor tracking, multi-attribution, goal tracking, event tracking, custom dimensions, custom reports, automated email reports, session recordings, tag manager, roll-up reporting to pull data from multiple sites, Google Analytics importer, heatmaps and more.

  Integrations include WordPress, Google Ads, Wix, Drupal, Joomla, Cloudflare, Magento, Vue, SharePoint, WooCommerce and more.

  Pricing starts free for Matomo On-Premise (but requires technical skills and servers to set up) and $23/month for Matomo Cloud, which includes a 21-day free trial (no credit card required).

  Pros

  • Best for respecting visitor privacy
  • You own your data — ensuring that it’s not shared with third parties for purposes like advertising
  • Compliant with the strictest privacy laws
  • Greater flexibility with open-source advantages, as well as the option to either self-host or cloud host
  • Can run cookieless — providing 100% accurate data and a better user experience without the need for an annoying cookie consent banner 
  • Exceptional customisability — from white labeling, alerts and custom dimensions to dashboards and reports, tailor your insights for faster decisions, deeper insights and superior outcomes

  Cons

  • On-Premise is free, but there are additional costs for advanced features
  • On-Premise requires servers and technical expertise to manage

  2. Google Analytics

  Google Analytics is the most well-known and used web analytics platform in the world, with nearly 30 million active websites.

  

  Why Google Analytics : It’s one of the leading web traffic analysis tools backed by the Alphabet group of companies. For anyone getting started, it’s a great free option to understand your web traffic and your audience.

  Google Analytics Standout Features and Integrations :

  Standout features include in-depth visitor tracking, event tracking with Google Analytics 4 (GA4), easy integration with Google marketing tools (i.e., Google Search Console and Google Ads), custom reports and easy data importing from third-party sources.

  Integrations include Google Ads, Google Webmaster Tools, AdSense, WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Zendesk, Facebook, Marketo, WordPress, Hotjar, SEMrush, Salesforce, Hootsuite and more.

  Pricing is free.

  Pros

  • Detailed audience insights
  • Customisable reports
  • Seamless integration with other Google products
  • Easy to set up

  Cons

  • Not privacy-friendly — you don’t own your data (data is shared with third parties for advertising purposes)
  • Complex interface
  • Requires cookie consent banner for GDPR compliance, which negatively impacts data accuracy and user experience

  3. Fathom Analytics

  Founded in 2018, Fathom Analytics is a privacy-friendly and lightweight web analytics tool. The platform offers a simple, minimalistic dashboard.

  

  Why Fathom Analytics : Fathom Analytics is a minimalistic tool to help website owners gain insights into customer behaviour without compromising on privacy. It’s an easy-to-use tool that offers a simplified breakdown of the most popular data points. For newcomers to web analytics seeking essential metrics like visitor counts and traffic sources, Fathom Analytics provides a straightforward, cost-effective solution.

  Fathom Analytics Standout Features and Integrations :

  Standout features include easy, automated GA4 importing with lifetime data retention, a single-page dashboard for a quick overview of metrics, traffic summaries for chosen timeframes, visually striking graphs for better data digestion and privacy protection covering major compliance regulations.

  Integrations include Google Analytics, Squarespace, Drupal, WordPress, Discourse, Bloggi, ConvertKit, Webflow, Transistor, Remix, Gatsby and Carrd.

  Pricing starts at $14/month for up to 100k pageviews (with a 30-day free trial).

  Pros

  • Doesn’t use cookies
  • Out-of-the-box GDPR, ePrivacy, PECR and CCPA compliance
  • Great for visual data insights
  • Lightweight tracking script for fast loading

  Cons

  • Can’t easily see traffic trends on specific pages
  • Metrics may be too simple for those wanting advanced analytics

  4. Mixpanel

  Mixpanel is a web analytics platform that helps you track visitors as well as improve customer retention. The software has 8,000 customers worldwide, including Netflix, Yelp, BuzzFeed and CNN.

  

  Why Mixpanel : Mixpanel is great for websites with e-commerce functionality. The tool helps you understand both your site visitors and your customers so you can optimise your customer experience and improve conversions.

  Mixpanel Standout Features and Integrations :

  Standout features include deep insights into how your products are being used, including your most popular features, user cohorts that let you segment users based on specific actions, and visual analysis showing where users drop off.

  Integrations include Google Cloud, Figma, Mailchimp, Zoho CRM, Databox, Marketo, Hotjar, Slack, Zapier, Amazon Web Services, Google Ads and HubSpot.

  Pricing starts free for up to 20 million events per month and $20/month for Growth.

  Pros

  • Interface is easy for beginners
  • Exhaustive reporting options
  • Custom event tracking options
  • Predict user actions based on data science models
  • Send targeted messages to specific users to encourage action

  Cons

  • User-based pricing isn’t the most ideal for everyone
  • Alert management can be confusing

  5. Kissmetrics

  Kissmetrics is a marketing and product analytics tool that helps e-commerce and SaaS companies grow through qualitative data insights. The web analytics tool is trusted by 10,000 users, including Microsoft, Unbounce, AWeber, Dropbox DocSend and SendGrid.

  

  Why Kissmetrics : As an e-commerce-driven analytics platform, the platform is best suited for Enterprise businesses, but it also offers flexible pricing plans that make it easy for someone to get their feet wet with website analytics. 

  Kissmetrics Standout Features and Integrations :

  Standout features include a customisable dashboard to see key metrics at a glance, comprehensive visitor tracking, cohort analysis including power user tracking to understand your most active visitors and customers and insights into customer lifetime value and churn rate.

  Integrations include Chargify, HubSpot, Slack, Live Chat, Marketo, Optimizely, Mailchimp, Recurly, Wufoo Forms, Facebook Ads, WordPress, Shopify and WooCommerce.

  Pricing starts at $0.0025/event for the Pay As You Go Plan, $25.99/month for Build Your Plan and $199/month for Small Teams, which includes a 7-day free trial.

  Pros

  • Flexible pricing options
  • Easy to install
  • Several analytics viewing options
  • Visual checkout funnel insights
  • Track sessions by desktop or mobile

  Cons

  • Despite more pricing options, it’s still quite expensive overall
  • Difficult to use for beginners

  6. Adobe Analytics

  Adobe Analytics is a web and marketing analytics platform within the Adobe Experience Platform. Used by over 170,000 businesses, it’s one of the most popular analytics solutions available.

  

  Why Adobe Analytics : Adobe Analytics was created for large organisations. It’s essentially the enterprise version of Google Analytics. The tool does a great job of offering a customised analytics solution that’s capable of delivering personalised user experiences at scale.

  Adobe Analytics Standout Features and Integrations :

  Standout features include attribution, AI-driven predictive analytics, robust customer segmentation and automation based on customer behaviour.

  Integrations include all Adobe products, Salesforce, Hootsuite, Contentsquare, Sisense, Mouseflow, Google Ads, Google Search Console, HubSpot and Microsoft Teams.

  Pricing is custom and available upon request, but users can expect to pay at least $2,000 per month, and there is no free trial.

  Pros

  • Built for enterprise businesses
  • Seamless workflow integration for Adobe Experience Cloud users
  • Incredible customisation options
  • Integration process is flexible
  • Capable of accurately tracking large volumes of traffic

  Cons

  • Very expensive
  • Not suitable for small businesses
  • The setup is challenging for beginners

  7. SimilarWeb

  SimilarWeb is a robust analytics platform used to track your website data and compare it to other websites. Backed by a team of experienced data scientists and mathematicians for in-depth website traffic and search engine analysis. Founded in 2007, the platform is trusted by major brands like Adidas, DHL, PepsiCo and Walmart.

  

  Why SimilarWeb : The tool relies on multiple scientific methodologies and approaches to data analysis to help provide a better understanding of visitors and customers. The platform is great for crafting prediction models for customer acquisitions by using machine learning to offer SEO insights and competitive analysis.

  SimilarWeb Standout Features and Integrations :

  Standout features include competition traffic and engagement analysis, in-depth visitor tracking, keyword analysis to optimise your SEO and search ads, affiliate traffic analysis, search traffic analysis and funnel insights.

  Integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Shift, AT Internet, Adverity, SimilarTech, Biscience and more. 

  Pricing starts at $125/month for the Starter plan, which includes a 7-day free trial.

  Pros

  • Has a user-friendly dashboard for simple insights
  • Highly customisable platform to meet your specific needs
  • Easy competition analysis
  • Funnel insights to improve your conversion rates
  • Great customer support

  Cons

  • Expensive pricing
  • Doesn’t include a code snippet to pull data directly from websites
  • Doesn’t show sub-domains of your site

  8. Hotjar

  Hotjar is a behavioural website analytics tool with a focus on providing insights into individual user sessions with features like heatmaps and session recordings. Founded in 2014, Hotjar is used by 900,000 sites around the world.

  

  Why Hotjar : Unlike traditional web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar is a behavioural analytics tool that provides in-depth behaviour insights session by session. The tool offers a variety of features that give you a sneak peek into your users’ behaviours by watching how they interact with your site action by action.

  Hotjar Standout Features and Integrations :

  Standout features include comprehensive heat mapping, visitor session recordings to see what visitors did moment by moment, feedback polls to gain insights from site visitors and conversion funnels to help you analyse leaks in your funnel at each conversion stage.

  Integrations include HubSpot, Slack, Jira, WordPress, Shopify, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Microsoft Teams, Zapier and ClickFunnels.

  Pricing starts at free for the Basic plan and $80/month for Business, which includes a 15-day free trial.

  Pros

  • You can see exactly where visitors click, move and scroll
  • Watch session replays to see what visitors did step-by-step
  • See what percentage of visitors take certain actions
  • Data segmentation features to help you understand KPIs in-depth
  • There are no user limits with the platform, making it easy to scale

  Cons

  • While it offers behavioural analytics, Hotjar doesn’t provide insights into traditional web analytics like Matomo does, including traffic sources and bounce rate
  • History data monitoring is complex

  Elevate your website performance today

  Understanding your visitors’ behaviour and needs is essential when you’re looking to improve your website performance.

  By leveraging a website analytics platform, you’ll be able to gain new insights into your visitors and use insights from your content and campaign performance to improve your user experience.

  If you’re looking to start using a web traffic analysis tool today, then Matomo is an excellent choice.

  Matomo is a powerful, privacy-friendly and compliant tool that gives in-depth insights into your audience, your content and your marketing efforts to help you improve your site’s performance.

  The platform also includes a variety of robust behavioural analytics features like heatmaps, session recording and more, which are included in your Cloud subscription. 

  Start your 21-day free trial of Matomo today (no credit card required).

• Privacy-enhancing technologies : Balancing data utility and security

  18 juillet, par Joe

  In the third quarter of 2024, data breaches exposed 422.61 million records, affecting millions of people around the world. This highlights the need for organisations to prioritise user privacy. 

  Privacy-enhancing technologies can help achieve this by protecting sensitive information and enabling safe data sharing. 

  This post explores privacy-enhancing technologies, including their types, benefits, and how our website analytics platform, Matomo, supports them by providing privacy-focused features.

  What are privacy-enhancing technologies ? 

  Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are tools that protect personal data while allowing organisations to process information responsibly. 

  In industries like healthcare, finance and marketing, businesses often need detailed analytics to improve operations and target audiences effectively. However, collecting and processing personal data can lead to privacy concerns, regulatory challenges, and reputational risks.

  PETs minimise the collection of sensitive information, enhance security and allow users to control how companies use their data. 

  Global privacy laws like the following are making PETs essential for compliance :

  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union
  • California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in California
  • Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in Canada
  • Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD) in Brazil

  Non-compliance can lead to severe penalties, including hefty fines and reputational damage. For example, under GDPR, organisations may face fines of up to €20 million or 4% of their global annual revenue for serious violations. 

  Types of PETs 

  What are the different types of technologies available for privacy protection ? Let’s take a look at some of them. 

  Homomorphic encryption

  Homomorphic encryption is a cryptographic technique in which users can perform calculations on cipher text without decrypting it first. When the results are decrypted, they match those of the same calculation on plain text. 

  This technique keeps data safe during processing, and users can analyse data without exposing private or personal data. It is most useful in financial services, where analysts need to protect sensitive customer data and secure transactions. 

  Despite these advantages, homomorphic encryption can be complex to compute and take longer than other traditional methods. 

  Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC)

  SMPC enables joint computations on private data without revealing the raw data. 

  In 2021, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) issued technical guidance supporting SMPC as a technology that protects privacy requirements. This highlights the importance of SMPC in healthcare and cybersecurity, where data sharing is necessary but sensitive information must be kept safe. 

  For example, several hospitals can collaborate on research without sharing patient records. They use SMPC to analyse combined data while keeping individual records confidential. 

  Synthetic data

  Synthetic data is artificially generated to mimic real datasets without revealing actual information. It is useful for training models without compromising privacy. 

  Imagine a hospital wants to train an AI model to predict patient outcomes based on medical records. Sharing real patient data, however, poses privacy challenges, so that can be changed with synthetic data. 

  Synthetic data may fail to capture subtle nuances or anomalies in real-world datasets, leading to inaccuracies in AI model predictions.

  Pseudonymisation

  Pseudonymisation replaces personal details with fake names or codes, making it hard to determine who the information belongs to. This helps keep people’s personal information safe. Even if someone gets hold of the data, it’s not easy to connect it back to real individuals. 

  

  Pseudonymisation works differently from synthetic data, though both help protect individual privacy. 

  When we pseudonymise, we take factual information and replace the bits that could identify someone with made-up labels. Synthetic data takes an entirely different approach. It creates new, artificial information that looks and behaves like real data but doesn’t contain any details about real people.

  Differential privacy

  Differential privacy adds random noise to datasets. This noise helps protect individual entries while still allowing for overall analysis of the data. 

  It’s useful in statistical studies where trends need to be understood without accessing personal details.

  For example, imagine a survey about how many hours people watch TV each week. 

  Differential privacy would add random variation to each person’s answer, so users couldn’t tell exactly how long John or Jane watched TV. 

  However, they could still see the average number of hours everyone in the group watched, which helps researchers understand viewing habits without invading anyone’s privacy.

  Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP)

  Zero-knowledge proofs help verify the truth without exposing sensitive details. This cryptographic approach lets someone prove they know something or meet certain conditions without revealing the actual information behind that proof.

  Take ZCash as a real-world example. While Bitcoin publicly displays every financial transaction detail, ZCash offers privacy through specialised proofs called Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs). These mathematical proofs confirm that a transaction follows all the rules without broadcasting who sent money, who received it, or how much changed hands.

  The technology comes with trade-offs, though. 

  Creating and checking these proofs demands substantial computing power, which slows down transactions and drives up costs. Implementing these systems requires deep expertise in advanced cryptography, which keeps many organisations from adopting them despite their benefits.

  Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)

  TEEs create special protected zones inside computer processors where sensitive code runs safely. These secure areas process valuable data while keeping it away from anyone who shouldn’t see it.

  TEEs are widely used in high-security applications, such as mobile payments, digital rights management (DRM), and cloud computing.

  Consider how companies use TEEs in the cloud : A business can run encrypted datasets within a protected area on Microsoft Azure or AWS Nitro Enclaves. Due to this setup, even the cloud provider can’t access the private data or see how the business uses it. 

  TEEs do face limitations. Their isolated design makes them struggle with large or spread-out computing tasks, so they don’t work well for complex calculations across multiple systems.

  Different TEE implementations often lack standardisation, so there can be compatibility issues and dependence on specific vendors. If the vendor stops the product or someone discovers a security flaw, switching to a new solution often proves expensive and complicated.

  Obfuscation (Data masking)

  Data masking involves replacing or obscuring sensitive data to prevent unauthorised access. 

  It replaces sensitive data with fictitious but realistic values. For example, a customer’s credit card number might be masked as “1234-XXXX-XXXX-5678.” 

  The original data is permanently altered or hidden, and the masked data can’t be reversed to reveal the original values.

  Federated learning

  Federated learning is a machine learning approach that trains algorithms across multiple devices without centralising the data. This method allows organisations to leverage insights from distributed data sources while maintaining user privacy.

  For example, NVIDIA’s Clara platform uses federated learning to train AI models for medical imaging (e.g., detecting tumours in MRI scans). 

  Hospitals worldwide contribute model updates from their local datasets to build a global model without sharing patient scans. This approach may be used to classify stroke types and improve cancer diagnosis accuracy.

  Now that we have explored the various types of PETs, it’s essential to understand the principles that guide their development and use. 

  Key principles of PET (+ How to enable them with Matomo) 

  PETs are based on several core principles that aim to balance data utility with privacy protection. These principles include :

  Data minimisation

  Data minimisation is a core PET principle focusing on collecting and retaining only essential data.

  Matomo, an open-source web analytics platform, helps organisations to gather insights about their website traffic and user behaviour while prioritising privacy and data protection. 

  Recognising the importance of data minimisation, Matomo offers several features that actively support this principle :

  • Cookieless tracking : Eliminates reliance on cookies, reducing unnecessary data collection.
  • IP anonymisation : Automatically anonymises IP addresses, preventing identification of individual users.

  

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  • Custom data retention policies : Allows organisations to define how long user data is stored before automatic deletion.

  7Assets, a fintech company, was using Google Analytics and Plausible as their web analytics tools. 

  However, with Google Analytics, they faced a problem of unnecessary data tracking, which created legal work overhead. Plausible didn’t have the features for the kind of analysis they wanted. 

  They switched to Matomo to enjoy the balance of privacy yet detailed analytics. With Matomo, they had full control over their data collection while also aligning with privacy and compliance requirements.

  Transparency and User Control

  Transparency and user control are important for trust and compliance. 

  Matomo enables these principles through :

  • Consent management : Offers integration with Consent Mangers (CMPs), like Cookiebot and Osano, for collecting and managing user consent.
  • Respect for DoNotTrack settings : Honours browser-based privacy preferences by default, empowering users with control over their data.

  

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  • Opt-out mechanisms : These include iframe features that allow visitors to opt out of tracking. 

  Security and Confidentiality

  Security and confidentiality protect sensitive data against inappropriate access. 

  Matomo achieves this through :

  • On-premise hosting : Gives organisations the ability to host analytics data on-site for complete data control.
  • Data security : Protects stored information through access controls, audit logs, two-factor authentication and SSL encryption.
  • Open source code : Enables community reviews for better security and transparency.

  Purpose Limitation

  Purpose limitation means organisations use data solely for the intended purpose and don’t share or sell it to third parties. 

  Matomo adheres to this principle by using first-party cookies by default, so there’s no third-party involvement. Matomo offers 100% data ownership, meaning all the data organisations get from our web analytics is of the organisation, and we don’t sell it to any external parties. 

  Compliance with Privacy Regulations

  Matomo aligns with global privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, LGPD and PECR. Its compliance features include :

  • Configurable data protection : Matomo can be configured to avoid tracking personally identifiable information (PII).
  • Data subject request tools : These provide mechanisms for handling requests like data deletion or access in accordance with legal frameworks.
  • GDPR manager : Matomo provides a GDPR Manager that helps businesses manage compliance by offering features like visitor log deletion and audit trails to support accountability.

  

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  Mandarine Academy is a French-based e-learning company. It found that complying with GDPR regulations was difficult with Google Analytics and thought GA4 was hard to use. Therefore, it was searching for a web analytics solution that could help it get detailed feedback on its site’s strengths and friction points while respecting privacy and GDPR compliance. With Matomo, it checked all the boxes.

  Data collaboration : A key use case of PETs

  One specific area where PETs are quite useful is data collaboration. Data collaboration is important for organisations for research and innovation. However, data privacy is at stake. 

  This is where tools like data clean rooms and walled gardens play a significant role. These use one or more types of PETs (they aren’t PETs themselves) to allow for secure data analysis. 

  Walled gardens restrict data access but allow analysis within their platforms. Data clean rooms provide a secure space for data analysis without sharing raw data, often using PETs like encryption. 

  Tackling privacy issues with PETs 

  Amidst data breaches and privacy concerns, organisations must find ways to protect sensitive information while still getting useful insights from their data. Using PETs is a key step in solving these problems as they help protect data and build customer trust. 

  Tools like Matomo help organisations comply with privacy laws while keeping data secure. They also allow individuals to have more control over their personal information, which is why 1 million websites use Matomo.

  In addition to all the nice features, switching to Matomo is easy :

  “We just followed the help guides, and the setup was simple,” said Rob Jones. “When we needed help improving our reporting, the support team responded quickly and solved everything in one step.” 

  To experience Matomo, sign up for our 21-day free trial, no credit card details needed.