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• Incrementality Testing : Quick-Start Guide (With Calculations)

  26 mars 2024, par Erin

  How do you know when a campaign is successful ? When you earn more revenue than last month ?

  Maybe.

  But how do you know how much of an impact a certain campaign or channel had on your sales ?

  With marketing attribution, you can determine credit for each sale.

  But if you want a deeper look, you need to understand the incremental impact of each channel and campaign.

  The way you do this ?

  Incrementality testing.

  In this guide, we break down what incrementality is, why it’s important and how to test it so you can double down on the activities driving the most growth.

  What is incrementality ?

  So, what exactly is incrementality ?

  Let’s say you just ran a marketing campaign for a new product. The launch was a success. Breakthrough numbers in your revenue. You used a variety of channels and activities to bring it all together.

  So, you launch a plan for next month’s campaign. But you don’t truly know what moved the needle.

  Did you just hit new highs because your audience is bigger ? And your brand is greater ?

  Or did the recent moves you made make a direct difference ?

  This is incrementality.

  

  Incrementality is growth directly attributed to marketing efforts beyond the overall impact of your brand. By measuring and conducting incrementality testing, you can clearly see how much of a difference each activity or channel truly impacted business growth. 

  What is incrementality testing ?

  Incrementality testing allows marketers to gauge the effectiveness of a marketing tactic or strategy. It tells you if a particular marketing activity had a positive, negative or neutral impact on your business. 

  It also tells you the overall impact it can have on your key performance indicators (KPIs). 

  The result ?

  You can pinpoint the highest-performing moves and incorporate them into your marketing workflows. You also discard marketing strategies with negligible, neutral or even negative impacts. 

  For example, let’s say you think a B2B LinkedIn ads campaign will help you reach your product launch goals. An incrementality test can tell you if the introduction of this campaign will help you get to the desired outcome.

  How incrementality testing works

  Before diving into your testing phase, you must clearly identify your KPIs.

  Here are the top KPIs you should be tracking on your website :

  • Ad impressions
  • Website visits
  • Leads
  • Sales

  The exact KPIs will depend on your marketing goals. You’re ready to move forward once you know your key performance indicators.

  Here’s how incrementality testing works step-by-step :

  1. Define a test and control group

  The first step is to define a test group and control group. 

  • A test group is a segment of your target audience that’s exposed to the marketing campaign. 
  • A control group is a segment that isn’t. 

  Keep in mind that both groups have similar demographics and other relevant characteristics. 

  2. Execute your campaign

  The second step is to run the marketing campaign on the test group. This can be a Facebook ad, LinkedIn ad or email marketing campaign.

  It all depends on your goals and your primary channels.

  3. Measure outcomes

  The third step is to measure the campaign’s impact based on your KPIs. 

  Let’s say a brand wants to see if a certain marketing move increases its leads. The test can tell them the number of email sign-ups with and without the campaign. 

  4. Compare results

  Next, compare the test group results with the control group. The difference in outcomes tells you the impact of that campaign. You can then use this difference to inform your future marketing strategies. 

  With Matomo, you can easily track results from campaigns — like conversions. 

  Our platform lets you quickly see what channels are getting the best results so you can gain insights into incrementality and optimise your strategy.

  Try Matomo for Free

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

  Start for free

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  Why it’s important to conduct incrementality tests

  The digital marketing industry is constantly changing. Marketers need to stay on their toes to keep up. Incrementality tests help you stay on track.

  For example, let’s say you’re selling laptops. You can increase your warranty period to three years to see the impact on sales. An incrementality test will tell you if this move will boost your sales (and by how much).

  Now, let’s dive into the reasons why you need to consistently conduct incrementality tests :

  Determine the right tactics for success

  Identifying the best action to grow your business is a challenge every marketer faces.

  The best way to identify marketing tactics is by conducting incrementality testing. These tactics are bound to work since data back them. As a result, you can optimise your marketing budget and maximise your ROIs. 

  It lets you run multiple tests to identify the most impactful strategy between :

  • An email marketing strategy
  • A social media strategy 
  • A PPC ad

  For instance, an incrementality test might suggest email marketing will be more cost-effective than an ad campaign. What you can do is :

  • Expose the test group to the email marketing campaign and then compare the results with the control group
  • Expose the test group to the ad campaign and then compare its results with the control group

  Then, you can calculate the difference in results between the two marketing campaigns. This lets you focus on the strategy with a better ROI or ROAS potential. 

  Accurate data

  Marketing data is powerful. But getting accurate data can be challenging. With incrementality testing, you get to know the true impact of a marketing campaign. 

  Plus, with this testing strategy, you don’t have to waste your marketing budget. 

  With Matomo, you get 100% accurate data on all website activities. 

  Unlike Google Analytics, Matomo doesn’t rely on inaccurate data sampling — limiting the amount of data analysed.

  Try Matomo for Free

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

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  Get the most out of your marketing investment

  Every business owner wants to maximise their return on investment. The ROI you get mainly depends on the marketing strategy. 

  For instance, email marketing offers an ROI of about 40:1 with some sources even reporting as high as 72:1.

  Incrementality testing helps you make informed investment decisions. With it, you can pinpoint the tactics that are most likely to bring the highest return. You can then focus your resources on them. It also helps you stay away from low-performing strategies. 

  Increase revenue

  It’s safe to say that the goal behind every marketing effort is a revenue boost. The higher your revenue, the more profits you generate. However, for many marketers, it’s an uphill battle. 

  With incrementality testing, you can boost your revenue by focusing your efforts in the right direction. 

  Get more traffic

  Incrementality testing tells you if a particular strategy can help you drive more traffic. You can use it to get more high-quality leads to your website or landing pages and double down on high-traffic strategies to increase those leads.

  How to test incrementality

  

  Developing an implementation plan is crucial to generate accurate insights from an incrementality test. Incrementality testing is like running a science experience. You need to go through several stages. Each stage is important for generating accurate results. 

  Here’s how you test incrementality :

  Define your goals

  Get clarity on what you want to achieve with this campaign. Which KPIs do you want to test ? Is it the return on your overall investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS) or something else ?

  Segment your audience

  Selecting the right audience segment is crucial to getting accurate insights with an incrementality test. Decide the demographics and psychographics of the audience you want to target. Then, divide this audience segment into two sub-parts :

  • Test group (people you’ll expose to the marketing campaign)
  • Control group (people who won’t be exposed to the campaign)

  These groups are a part of the larger segment. This means people in both groups will have similar attributes. 

  Launch the test at the right time

  Before the launch, decide on the length of the test. Ideally, it should be at least one week. Don’t run any other campaigns in this window, as it can interfere with the results. 

  Analyse the data and take action

  Once the campaign is over, measure the results from both groups. Compare the data to identify incremental lift in your selected KPIs. 

  Let’s say you want to see if this campaign can boost your sales. Check to see if the test group responded differently than the control group. If the sales equal your desired outcome, you have a winning strategy. 

  Not all incrementality tests result in a positive incremental lift ; Some can be neutral, indicating that the campaign didn’t have any effect. Some can even indicate a negative lift, which means your core group performed better than the test group. 

  Lastly, take action based on the test findings. 

  Incrementality test examples 

  You can use incrementality testing to identify gaps and growth opportunities in your strategy. 

  Here’s an example :

  Let’s say a company runs an incrementality test on a YouTube marketing strategy for sales. The results indicate that the ROI was only $0.10, as the company makes $1.10 for every $1.00 spent. This alarms the marketing department and helps them optimise the campaign for a higher ROI. 

  Here’s another practical example :

  Let’s say a retail business wanted to test the effectiveness of its ad campaign. So, the retailer optimises its ad campaign after conducting an incrementality test on a test and control group. As a result, they experienced a 34% incremental increase in sales.

  How to calculate incrementality in marketing

  Once you’ve aggregated the data, it’s time to calculate. There are two ways to calculate incrementality :

  Incremental profit 

  The first one is incremental profit. It tells you how much profit you can generate with a strategy (If any). With it, you get the actual value of a marketing campaign. 

  It’s calculated with the following formula :

  Test group profit – control group profit = incremental profit 

  For example, let’s say you’re exposing a test group to a paid ads campaign. And it generates a profit of $3,000. On the other hand, the control group generated a $2,000 profit. 

  In this case, your incremental profit will be $1,000 ($3,000 – $2,000). 

  However, if the paid ads campaign generates a $2,000 profit, the incremental profit would be zero. Essentially, you’re generating the same profit as before, which means the campaign doesn’t work. Similarly, a marketing strategy is no good if it generates lower profits than the control group. 

  Incremental lift

  Incremental lift measures the difference in the conversions you generate with each group. 

  Here’s the formula :

  (Test – Control)/Control x 100 = Lift

  So, let’s say the test group and control group generated 2,000 and 1,000 conversions, respectively. 

  The incremental lift you’ll get from this incrementality test would be :

  (2,000 – 1,000)/1,000 x 100 = 100

  This turns out to be a 100% incremental lift.

  How to track incrementality with Matomo

  Incrementality testing lets you use a practical approach to identify the best marketing path for your business.

  It helps you develop a hyper-focused approach that gives you access to accurate and practical data. 

  With these insights, you can confidently move forward to maximise your ROI since it helps you focus on high-performing tactics. 

  The result is more revenue and profit for your business. 

  Plus, all you need to do is identify your target audience, divide them into two groups and run your test. Then, the results will be compared to determine if the marketing strategy offers any value. 

  Conducting incrementality tests may take time and expertise. 

  But, thanks to Matomo, you can leverage accurate insights for your incrementality tests to ensure you make the right decisions to grow your business.

  See for yourself why over 1 million websites choose Matomo. Try it free for 21-days now. No credit card required.

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• 5 Key Benefits of Using a Tag Manager

  12 décembre 2021, par erin — Analytics Tips, Marketing

  Websites today have become very complex to manage, and as you continue to look for ways to optimise your website, you’ll want to consider using a Tag Manager. 

  A Tag Manager will help your marketing team seamlessly track how your visitors are engaging with your website’s elements. Without a Tag Manager, you are missing out on business-altering insights.

  In this blog, we’ll cover :

  Tag Manager overview 

  A Tag Manager (AKA Tag Management System or TMS) is a centralised system for implementing, managing and tracking events. A tag is just another word for a piece of code on a website that tracks a specific event. 

  An example of a tag tracking code might be Facebook pixels, ad conversions and other website activities such as signing up to a newsletter or PDF download. 

  Triggers are the actual actions that website visitors take that activate the tag. Examples of triggers are things like : 

  • A thank you page view to show that a visitor has completed a conversion action
  • Clicking a download or sign up button 
  • Scroll depth or how far down users are scrolling on your webpage 

  Each of these will give you insights into how your website is performing and how your users are engaging with your content. Going back to the scroll depth trigger example, this would be particularly helpful for validating bounce rate and finding out where users are dropping off on a page. Discover other ways to take advantage of tags and event tracking. 

  

  5 key benefits of a Tag Manager

  1. Removes the risks of website downtime 

  Tags are powerful for in-depth web analytics. However, tagging opens up the potential for non-technical team members to break the front-end of your website in a couple of clicks. 

  A Tag Manager reduces that risk. For example, Matomo Tag Manager lets you preview tags to see if they are firing before pushing them live. You can also give specific users restricted access so you can approve any tagging before it goes live. 

  Tag Managers protect the functionality of your website and ensure that there is no downtime.

  2. Your website will load faster 

  When it comes to the success of your website, page speed is one of the most important factors. 

  Each time you add a tag to your site, you run the risk of slowing down the page speed. This can quickly build up to a poor performing site and frustrate your visitors.

  You can’t track tags if visitors won’t even stay long enough for your site to load. In fact, 1 in 4 visitors would abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load. According to Deloitte, just a 0.1 second difference in loading speed can affect every step of your customer journey. 

  A Tag Manager, on the other hand, is a lightweight option only requiring one single tag. Using a Tag Manager to track events can make all the difference to your website’s performance and user experience.

  3. Greater efficiency for marketing

  Time is critical in marketing. The longer it takes for a campaign to launch, the greater the chances are that you’re missing out on sales opportunities.

  Waiting for the IT team to tag a thank you page before setting an ad live is inefficient and impacts your bottom line.

  Equipping marketing with a Tag Manager means that they’ll be able to launch campaigns faster and more effectively.

  Check out our Marketer’s Guide to Successful Website Event Tracking for more.

  4. Control all of your tracking and marketing tags in one place 

  Keeping track of what tags are on your site and where they’re located is a complicated task if you aren’t using a Tag Manager. Unmanaged tags can quickly pile up and result in errors with your analytics, like counting conversions twice. 

  Using a Tag Manager to centralise your tags in one easy to manage place reduces the chances of human errors. Instead, your team will be able to quickly see what tags are already in place so they aren’t doubling up on tracking.

  5. Reduce work for the IT team 

  Let’s face it, the IT team has more critical tasks at hand than adding tags to the website. Freeing up your IT team to focus on higher priority tasks should always be a goal.

  Tagging, while crucial for marketing, has the potential to create a lot of extra work for your website developers. Inserting code for each individual tag is time-consuming and means you aren’t collecting data in the meantime.

  Rather than overloading your IT team, empower your marketing team with the ability to add tags with a few clicks. 

  How to choose a Tag Management System

  There are many tools to choose from and the default option tends to be Google Tag Manager (GTM). But before you implement GTM or any other Tag Management Solution, we highly recommend asking these questions :

  1. What are my goals for a Tag Manager ? Before purchasing a Tag Manager, or any tool for that matter, understanding your goals upfront is best practice.
  2. Does the solution offer Tag Manager training resources ? If online Tag Manager training and educational resources are available for the tool, then you’ll be able to hit the ground running and start to see an ROI instantly.
  3. Can I get online support ? In case you need any help with the tool, having access to online support is a big bonus. 
  4. Is it compliant with privacy regulations ? If your business is already compliant, in the process of becoming compliant or future-proofing your tech stack for looming privacy regulations, then researching this is crucial. 
  5. How much does it cost ? If it’s “free”, find out how and why. In most cases, free solutions are just vehicles for collecting data to advertise to your users. 
  6. What do others think about the Tag Manager ? Check out reviews on sites like Capterra or G2 to find out how other businesses rate the tool. 

  Google Tag Manager alternative

  As privacy becomes a greater concern globally for end-users and governments, many businesses are looking for alternatives to the world’s largest advertising company – Google.

  Matomo Tag Manager is more than a Google Tag Manager alternative. With Matomo Tag Manager, you get a GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA and PECR compliant, open source Tag Manager and your data is 100% yours to own.

  Plus, with Matomo Tag Manager you only need one single tracking code for all of your website and tag analytics. No matter what you are tracking (scrolls, clicks, downloads, Heatmaps, visits, etc.), you will only ever need one piece of code on your website and one tool to manage it all. 

  The takeaway 

  Tagging is powerful but can quickly become complicated, risky and time-consuming. Tag Managers reduce these obstacles allowing you to set tags and triggers effortlessly. It empowers marketing teams, streamlines processes and removes the reliance on IT.

  Ready to try Matomo Tag Manager ? Start your 21-day free trial now – no credit card required. 

• How to Check Website Traffic As Accurately As Possible

  18 août 2023, par Erin — Analytics Tips

  If you want to learn about the health of your website and the success of your digital marketing initiatives, there are few better ways than checking your website traffic. 

  It’s a great way to get a quick dopamine hit when things are up, but you can also use traffic levels to identify issues, learn more about your users or benchmark your performance. That means you need a reliable and easy way to check your website traffic over time — as well as a way to check out your competitors’ traffic levels, too. 

  In this article, we’ll show you how to do just that. You’ll learn how to check website traffic for both your and your competitor’s sites and discover why some methods of checking website traffic are better than others. 

  Why check website traffic ? 

  Dopamine hits aside, it’s important to constantly monitor your website’s traffic for several reasons.

  

  Benchmark site performance

  Keeping regular tabs on your traffic levels is a great way to track your website’s performance over time. It can help you plan for the future or identify problems. 

  For instance, growing traffic levels may mean expanding your business’s offering or investing in more inventory. On the flip side, decreasing traffic levels may suggest it’s time to revamp your marketing strategies or look into issues impacting your SEO. 

  Analyse user behaviour

  Checking website traffic and user behaviour lets marketing managers understand how users interact with your website. Which pages are they visiting ? Which CTAs do they click on ? What can you do to encourage users to take the actions you want ? You can also identify issues that lead to high bounce rates and other problems. 

  The better you understand user behaviour, the easier it will be to give them what they want. For example, you may find that users spend more time on your landing pages than they do your blog pages. You could use that information to revise how you create blog posts or focus on creating more landing pages. 

  Improve the user experience

  Once you understand how users behave on your website, you can use that information to fix errors, update your content and improve the user experience for the site. 

  You can even personalise the experience for customers, leading to significant growth. Research shows companies that grow faster derive 40% more of their revenue from personalisation. 

  That could come in the form of sweeping personalisations — like rearranging your website’s navigation bar based on user behaviour — or individual personalisation that uses analytics to transform sections or entire pages of your site based on user behaviour. 

  Optimise marketing strategies

  You can use website traffic reports to understand where users are coming from and optimise your marketing plan accordingly. You may want to double down on organic traffic, for instance, or invest more in PPC advertising. Knowing current traffic estimates and how these traffic levels have trended over time can help you benchmark your campaigns and prioritise your efforts. 

  Increasing traffic levels from other countries can also help you identify new marketing opportunities. If you start seeing significant traffic levels from a neighbouring country or a large market, it could be time to take your business international and launch a cross-border campaign. 

  Filter unwanted traffic

  A not-insignificant portion of your site’s traffic may be coming from bots and other unwanted sources. These can compromise the quality of your analytics and make it harder to draw insights. You may not be able to get rid of this traffic, but you can use analytics tools to remove it from your stats. 

  How to check website traffic on Matomo

  If you want to check your website’s traffic, you’d be forgiven for heading to Google Analytics first. It’s the most popular analytics tool on the market, after all. But if you want a more reliable assessment of your website’s traffic, then we recommend using Matomo alongside Google Analytics. 

  The Matomo web analytics platform is an open-source solution that helps you collect accurate data about your website’s traffic and make more informed decisions as a result — all while enhancing the customer experience and ensuring GDPR compliance and user privacy. 

  Matomo also offers multiple ways to check website traffic :

  • Visits log report
  • Real-time visitor map
  • Visits in real-time report

  Let’s look at all of them one by one. 

  The visits log report is a unique rundown of all of the individual visitors to your site. This offers a much more granular view than other tools that just show the total number of visitors for a given period. 

  

  You can access the visits log report by clicking on the reporting menu, then clicking Visitor and Visits Log. From there, you’ll be able to scroll through every user session and see the following information :

  • The location of the user
  • The total number of actions they took
  • The length of time on site
  • How they arrived at your site
  • And the device they used to access your site 

  This may be overwhelming if your site receives thousands of visitors at a time. But it’s a great way to understand users at an individual level and appreciate the lifetime activity of specific users. 

  The Real-time visitor map is a visual display of users’ location for a given timeframe. If you have an international website, it’s a fantastic way to see exactly where in the world your traffic comes from.

  

  You can access the Real-time Visitor Map by clicking Visitor in the main navigation menu and then Real-time Map. The map itself is colour-coded. Larger orange bubbles represent recent visits, and smaller dark orange and grey bubbles represent older visits. The map will refresh every five seconds, and new users appear with a flashing effect. 

  If you run TV or radio adverts, Matomo’s Real-time Map provides an immediate read on the effectiveness of your campaign. If your map lights up in the minutes following your ad, you know it’s been effective. It can also help you identify the source of bot attacks, too. 

  Finally, the Visits in Real-time report provides a snapshot of who is browsing your website. You can access this report under Visitors > Real-time and add it to your custom dashboards as a widget. 

  Open the report, and you’ll see the real-time flow of your site’s users and counters for visits and pageviews over the last 30 minutes and 24 hours. The report refreshes every five seconds with new users added to the top of the report with a fade-in effect.

  

  The report provides a snapshot of each visitor, including :

  • Whether they are new or a returning 
  • Their country
  • Their browser
  • Their operating system
  • The number of actions they took
  • The time they spent on the site
  • The channel they came in from
  • Whether the visitor converted a goal

  3 other ways to check website traffic

  You don’t need to use Matomo to check your website traffic. Here are three other tools you can use instead. 

  How to check website traffic on Google Analytics

  Google Analytics is usually the first starting point for anyone looking to check their website traffic. It’s free to use, incredibly popular and offers a wide range of traffic reports. 

  Google Analytics lets you break down historical traffic data almost any way you wish. You can split traffic by acquisition channel (organic, social media, direct, etc.) by country, device or demographic.

  

  It also provides real-time traffic reports that give you a snapshot of users on your site right now and over the last 30 minutes. 

  

  Google Analytics may be one of the most popular ways to check website traffic, but it could be better. Google Analytics 4 is difficult to use compared to its predecessor, and it also limits the amount of data you can track in accordance with privacy laws. If users refuse your cookie consent, Google Analytics won’t record these visits. In other words, you aren’t getting a complete view of your traffic by using Google Analytics alone. 

  That’s why it’s important to use Google Analytics alongside other web analytics tools (like Matomo) that don’t suffer from the same privacy issues. That way, you can make sure you track every single user who visits your site. 

  How to check website traffic on Google Search Console

  Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that lets you analyse the search traffic that your site gets from Google. 

  The top-line report shows you how many times your website has appeared in Google Search, how many clicks it has received, the average clickthrough rate and the average position of your website in the search results. 

  

  Google Search Console is a great way to understand what you rank for and how much traffic your organic rankings generate. It will also show you which pages are indexed in Google and whether there are any crawling errors. 

  Unfortunately, Google Search Console is limited if you want to get a complete view of your traffic. While you can analyse search traffic in a huge amount of detail, it will not tell you how users who access your website directly or via social media behave. 

  How to check website traffic on Similarweb

  Similarweb is a website analysis tool that estimates the total traffic of any site on the internet. It is one of the best tools for estimating how much traffic your competitors receive. 

  What’s great about Similarweb is that it estimates total traffic, not just traffic from search engines like many SEO tools. It even breaks down traffic by different channels, allowing you to see how your website compares against your competitors. 

  

  As you can see from the image above, Similarweb provides an estimate of total visits, bounce rate, the average number of pages users view per visit and the average duration on the site. The company also has a free browser extension that lets you check website traffic estimates as you browse the web. 

  You can use Similarweb for free to a point. But to really get the most out of this tool, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan which starts at $125 per user per month. 

  The price isn’t the only downside of using Similarweb to check the traffic of your own and your competitor’s websites. Ultimately, Similarweb is only an estimate — even if it’s a reasonably accurate one — and it’s no match for a comprehensive analytics tool. 

  7 website traffic metrics to track

  Now that you know how to check your website’s traffic, you can start to analyse it. You can use plenty of metrics to assess the quality of your website traffic, but here are some of the most important metrics to track. 

  • New visitors : These are users who have never visited your website before. They are a great sign that your marketing efforts are working and your site is reaching more people. But it’s also important to track how they behave on the website to ensure your site caters effectively to new visitors. 
  • Returning visitors : Returning visitors are coming back to your site for a reason : either they like the content you’re creating or they want to make a purchase. Both instances are great. The more returning visitors, the better. 
  • Bounce rate : This is a measure of how many users leave your website without taking action. Different analytics tools measure this metric differently.
  • Session duration : This is the length of time users spend on your website, and it can be a great gauge of whether they find your site engaging. Especially when combined with the metric below. 
  • Pages per session : This measures how many different pages users visit on average. The more pages they visit and the longer users spend on your website, the more engaging it is. 
  • Traffic source : Traffic can come from a variety of sources (organic, direct, social media, referral, etc.) Tracking which sources generate the most traffic can help you analyse and prioritise your marketing efforts. 
  • User demographics : This broad metric tells you more about who the users are that visit your website, what device they use, what country they come from, etc. While the bulk of your website traffic will come from the countries you target, an influx of new users from other countries can open the door to new opportunities.

  Why do my traffic reports differ ?

  If you use more than one of the methods above to check your website traffic, you’ll quickly realise that every traffic report differs. In some cases, the reasons are obvious. Any tool that estimates your traffic without adding code to your website is just that : an estimate. Tools like Similarweb will never offer the accuracy of analytics platforms like Matomo and Google Analytics. 

  But what about the differences between these analytics platforms themselves ? While each platform has a different way of recording user behaviour, significant differences in website traffic reports between analytics platforms are usually a result of how each platform handles user privacy. 

  A platform like Google Analytics requires users to accept a cookie consent banner to track them. If they accept, great. Google collects all of the data that any other analytics platform does. It may even collect more. If users reject cookie consent banners, however, then Google Analytics can’t track these visitors at all. They simply won’t show up in your traffic reports. 

  That doesn’t happen with all analytics platforms, however. A privacy-focused alternative like Matomo doesn’t require cookie consent banners (apart from in the United Kingdom and Germany) and can therefore continue to track visitors even after they have rejected a cookie consent screen from Google Analytics. This means that virtually all of your website traffic will be tracked regardless of whether users accept a cookie consent banner or not. And it’s why traffic reports in Matomo are often much higher than they are in Google Analytics.

  

  Given that around half (47.32%) of adults in the European Union refuse to allow the use of personal data tracking for advertising purposes and that 95% of people will reject additional cookies when it is easy to do so, this means you could have vastly different traffic reports — and be missing out on a significant amount of user data. 

  If you’re serious about using web analytics to improve your website and optimise your marketing campaigns, then it is essential to use another analytics platform alongside Google Analytics. 

  Get more accurate traffic reports with Matomo

  There are several methods to check website traffic. Some, like Similarweb, can provide estimates on your competitors’ traffic levels. Others, like Google Analytics, are free. But data doesn’t lie. Only privacy-focused analytics solutions like Matomo can provide accurate reports that account for every visitor. 

  Join over one million organisations using Matomo to accurately check their website traffic. Try it for free alongside GA today. No credit card required.