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• CJEU rules US cloud servers don’t comply with GDPR and what this means for web analytics

  17 juillet 2020, par Jake Thornton
  Breaking news : On July 16, 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that any cloud services hosted in the US are incapable of complying with the GDPR and EU privacy laws.

  In August 2016, the EU-US Privacy Shield framework came into effect, which “protects the fundamental rights of anyone in the EU whose personal data is transferred to the United States for commercial purposes. It allows the free transfer of data to companies that are certified in the US under the Privacy Shield.” – European Commission website

  However after today’s CJEU ruling, this Privacy Shield framework became invalidated due to significant differences between EU and US privacy laws.

  European privacy law activist Max Schrems summarises with “The Court clarified for a second time now that there is a clash between EU privacy law and US surveillance law. As the EU will not change its fundamental rights to please the NSA, the only way to overcome this clash is for the US to introduce solid privacy rights for all people – including foreigners. Surveillance reform thereby becomes crucial for the business interests of Silicon Valley.” – noyb website

  Today’s ruling also continues to spark concern into the legitimacy of US privacy laws which doesn’t fully protect people’s personal data when hosted on cloud servers based in the US.

  

  How will this affect you ?

  For any business operating a website in the EU or if you have traffic coming to your website from EU visitors, you need to know what data you’re capturing and where this data is being stored.

  Here’s what Maja Smoltczyk (Berlin’s Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information) says :

  Controllers who transfer personal data to the USA, especially when using cloud-based services, are now required to switch immediately to service providers based in the European Union or a country that can
  ensure an adequate level of data protection. The CJEU has made it refreshingly clear that data exports are not just financial decisions, as people’s fundamental rights must also be considered as a matter of priority. This ruling will put
  an end to the transfer of personal data to the USA for the sake of convenience or to cut costs.

  The controller is you (not Google) and by transferring data to the US you are at risk of being fined up to €20 million or 4% of your annual worldwide turnover for not being GDPR compliant. 

  It’s you who has to take action, not Google or other US companies. The court’s decision has immediate effect. While we assume there will be a grace period, companies should act now as finding and implementing alternatives solution can take a while. 

  Can no data be exported outside the EU anymore ?

  Data can still be exported outside the EU if an adequate level of data protection is guaranteed. This is the case for some trading partners of the EU such as New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland, and Canada. They have been certified by the EU as having a comparable level of privacy protection and therefore demonstrate adequacy at a country level.

  Necessary data can still flow to countries like the US too. This is for example the case when someone books a hotel in the US or when sending an email to someone in the US. Backups for disaster recovery and most other reasons don’t qualify as necessary.

  In all other cases you can still send data to countries like the US if you get explicit and informed consent from a user. Meaning the user has been informed about all possible risks of sending the data to the US and who can access the data (for example the US government).

  How this affects Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager users

  If your website is using Google Analytics, the safest bet is to deactivate it immediately. Otherwise, you must ask for consent from everyone who visits your website and inform them that the data will be processed in the United States under less strict privacy laws and all associated risks. If you don’t, you could be liable to privacy law infringements and face being fined for not complying with the GDPR. This also applies to Google Tag Manager as it transfers the IP address to the US which is considered personal data under the GDPR.

  Consent needs to be :

  • Freely given (the user must have a choice to not give consent and be able to opt out at any time) 
  • Informed (you need to disclose who is processing the data, what data is processed, where the data will be stored and how to opt out) 
  • Specific (consent is only valid for the specific informed purpose) 
  • Unambiguous (for example pre-ticked boxes or similar aren’t allowed)

  

  If users don’t give you consent, you are not allowed to track them using Google Analytics or any other US based cloud solution.

  Update August 19, 2020

  A month after this ruling, over 100 complaints have been filed against websites for continuing to send data to the US via Google Analytics or Facebook, by the European privacy campaign group noyb. It’s clear Google and Facebook fall under US surveillance laws such as FISA 702 and the court clearly ruled these companies cannot rely on SCCs to transfer data to the US. Anyone still using Google Analytics is now at risk of facing fines and compensation damages. 

  How this affects Matomo users

  Our cloud servers are based in Germany.

  Matomo On-Premise users choose the location of their data themselves. If the servers are located in the EU nothing changes. If the servers are located outside the EU and the website targets EU users and tracks personal data, then you need to assess whether you are required to ask for tracking consent.

  If the data is stored inside the EU you can use Matomo without asking for any consent and you can continue tracking users even if they reject a consent screen which greatly increases the quality of your data.

  Want to avoid informing users about transferring their data to the US and all associated risks ?

  Try Matomo now for free ! No credit card required.

  Download Matomo

• What is a Cohort Report ? A Beginner’s Guide to Cohort Analysis

  3 janvier 2024, par Erin

  Handling your user data as a single mass of numbers is rarely conducive to figuring out meaningful patterns you can use to improve your marketing campaigns.

  A cohort report (or cohort analysis) can help you quickly break down that larger audience into sequential segments and contrast and compare based on various metrics. As such, it is a great tool for unlocking more granular trends and insights — for example, identifying patterns in engagement and conversions based on the date users first interacted with your site.

  In this guide, we explain the basics of the cohort report and the best way to set one up to get the most out of it.

  What is a cohort report ?

  In a cohort report, you divide a data set into groups based on certain criteria — typically a time-based cohort metric like first purchase date — and then analyse the data across those segments, looking for patterns.

  Date-based cohort analysis is the most common approach, often creating cohorts based on the day a user completed a particular action — signed up, purchased something or visited your website. Depending on the metric you choose to measure (like return visits), the cohort report might look something like this :

  

  Note that this is not a universal benchmark or anything of the sort. The above is a theoretical cohort analysis based on app users who downloaded the app, tracking and comparing the retention rates as the days go by. 

  The benchmarks will be drastically different depending on the metric you’re measuring and the basis for your cohorts. For example, if you’re measuring returning visitor rates among first-time visitors to your website, expect single-digit percentages even on the second day.

  Your industry will also greatly affect what you consider positive in a cohort report. For example, if you’re a subscription SaaS, you’d expect high continued usage rates over the first week. If you sell office supplies to companies, much less so.

  What is an example of a cohort ?

  As we just mentioned, a typical cohort analysis separates users or customers by the date they first interacted with your business — in this case, they downloaded your app. Within that larger analysis, the users who downloaded it on May 3 represent a single cohort.

  

  In this case, we’ve chosen behaviour and time — the app download day — to separate the user base into cohorts. That means every specific day denotes a specific cohort within the analysis.

  Diving deeper into an individual cohort may be a good idea for important holidays or promotional events like Black Friday.

  Of course, cohorts don’t have to be based on specific behaviour within certain periods. You can also create cohorts based on other dimensions :

  • Transactional data — revenue per user
  • Churn data — date of churn
  • Behavioural cohort — based on actions taken on your website, app or e-commerce store, like the number of sessions per user or specific product pages visited
  • Acquisition cohort — which channel referred the user or customer

  For more information on different cohort types, read our in-depth guide on cohort analysis.

  How to create a cohort report (and make sense of it)

  Matomo makes it easy to view and analyse different cohorts (without the privacy and legal implications of using Google Analytics).

  Here are a few different ways to set up a cohort report in Matomo, starting with our built-in cohorts report.

  Cohort reports

  With Matomo, cohort reports are automatically compiled based on the first visit date. The default metric is the percentage of returning visitors.

  

  Changing the settings allows you to create multiple variations of cohort analysis reports.

  Break down cohorts by different metrics

  The percentage of returning visits can be valuable if you’re trying to improve early engagement in a SaaS app onboarding process. But it’s far from your only option.

  You can also compare performance by conversion, revenue, bounce rate, actions per visit, average session duration or other metrics.

  

  Change the time and scope of your cohort analysis

  Splitting up cohorts by single days may be useless if you don’t have a high volume of users or visitors. If the average cohort size is only a few users, you won’t be able to identify reliable patterns. 

  Matomo lets you set any time period to create your cohort analysis report. Instead of the most recent days, you can create cohorts by week, month, year or custom date ranges. 

  

  Cohort sizes will depend on your customer base. Make sure each cohort is large enough to encapsulate all the customers in that cohort and not so small that you have insignificant cohorts of only a few customers. Choose a date range that gives you that without scaling it too far so you can’t identify any seasonal trends.

  Cohort analysis can be a great tool if you’ve recently changed your marketing, product offering or onboarding. Set the data range to weekly and look for any impact in conversions and revenue after the changes.

  Using the “compare to” feature, you can also do month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter or any custom date range comparisons. This approach can help you get a rough overview of your campaign’s long-term progress without doing any in-depth analysis.

  You can also use the same approach to compare different holiday seasons against each other.

  If you want to combine time cohorts with segmentation, you can run cohort reports for different subsets of visitors instead of all visitors. This can lead to actionable insights like adjusting weekend or specific seasonal promotions to improve conversion rates.

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  Easily create custom cohort reports beyond the time dimension

  If you want to split your audience into cohorts by focusing on something other than time, you will need to create a custom report and choose another dimension. In Matomo, you can choose from a wide range of cohort metrics, including referrers, e-commerce signals like viewed product or product category, form submissions and more.

  

  Then, you can create a simple table-based report with all the insights you need by choosing the metrics you want to see. For example, you could choose average visit duration, bounce rate and other usage metrics.

  

  If you want more revenue-focused insights, add metrics like conversions, add-to-cart and other e-commerce events.

  Custom reports make it easy to create cohort reports for almost any dimension. You can use any metric within demographic and behavioural analytics to create a cohort. (You can explore the complete list of our possible segmentation metrics.)

  We cover different types of custom reports (and ideas for specific marketing campaigns) in our guide on custom segmentation.

  Create your first cohort report and gain better insights into your visitors

  Cohort reports can help you identify trends and the impact of short-term marketing efforts like events and promotions.

  With Matomo cohort reports you have the power to create complex custom reports for various cohorts and segments. 

  If you’re looking for a powerful, easy-to-use web analytics solution that gives you 100% accurate data without compromising your users’ privacy, Matomo is a great fit. Get started with a 21-day free trial today. No credit card required. 

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• 12 ways Matomo Analytics helps you to protect your visitor’s privacy

  5 mai 2020, par InnoCraft — Analytics Tips, Privacy, Security

  This post was originally published on January 11, 2017, and updated on May, 2020.

  At Matomo we think privacy matters. From the beginning, Matomo has had a strong focus on privacy and ensuring the privacy of your visitors and analytics data. 

  Here are some ways how you can ensure your users and visitors privacy by using Matomo (Piwik).

  1. Owning the data gives you power to protect user privacy

  Whether you host Matomo on-premises yourself, or whether you use Matomo’s cloud, YOU keep control of your data and nobody else. By knowing exactly where your data is stored and having full control over what happens to it, you have the power to protect your user’s privacy. No-one else can claim ownership. 

  2. GDPR compliance

  GDPR is one of the most important privacy laws to have come out in the last few years. As such, Matomo takes GDPR compliance very seriously. There’s even a 12-step checklist for you to follow to ensure your Matomo is GDPR compliant. Not only that Matomo is HIPAA, CCPA, LGPD, and PECR compliant.

  3. Data anonymization

  For better privacy by default, Matomo implements a range of data anonymization techniques. One of the main techniques is not recording the full IP address of your visitors. Some countries even require you to anonymize additional info considered Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

  To change the IP anonymization settings go to “Administration > Privacy”. 

  

  4. Configuring Matomo to not process personal data or personally identifiable information (PII)

  To further protect the privacy of your visitors, you can learn how to not process any personal information or PII. 

  5. Deleting old visitor logs

  The is important because visitor logs contain information all the collected raw data about every visitor and every action. You can configure Matomo to automatically delete logs from the database. When you delete old logs, only the real time and visitor log reports will no longer work for this old time period, all other aggregated reports will still work.

  For privacy reasons, we highly recommend that you keep the detailed Matomo logs for only 3 to 6 months and delete older log data. This has one other nice side effect : it will free significant database space, which will, in turn, slightly increase performance !

  

  6. Supporting the Do Not Track preference

  Do Not Track enables users to opt out of any tracking by websites they do not visit, including analytics services, advertising networks, and social platforms. By default, Matomo respects users preference and will not track visitors which have specified “I do not want to be tracked” in their web browsers. Get more information about DoNotTrack.

  To make sure Do Not Track is respected, go to “Administration => Privacy”.

  7. Including an Opt-Out Feature on your website or app

  By embedding the Opt-Out feature in your website, you give your visitors the possibility to opt-out of the tracking. When you go to “Administration > Privacy”, you will be able to copy and paste an HTML Iframe code to embed the opt-out feature for example into your privacy policy page or in your ‘Legal’ page. Your users can then click on a link to opt-out.

  On the Matomo Marketplace there are also some plugins available to customize the Opt-Out experience. For example AjaxOptOut and CustomOptOut.

  

  8. Disabling Live features

  The Real-Time, Visitor Log and Visitor Profile features give you insights into the tracked raw data by showing you details about every visitor and every action they performed. To protect the privacy of your visitors you may decide to prevent access to such features by disabling the “Live” plugin in “Administration => Plugins”. This way only aggregated reports will be shown in your Matomo.

  9. Disabling fingerprinting across websites

  By default, when one of your visitors visits several of your websites, Matomo will create a fingerprint for this user that will be different across the websites to increase the visitors’ privacy. You can make sure that this feature is disabled by going to “Administration => Config file” and verifying that the value of “enable_fingerprinting_across_websites” is set to zero.

  10. Disabling tracking cookies

  Matomo uses first-party cookies to store some information about visitors between visits. In some countries, the legislation requires websites to provide a way for users to opt-out of all tracking, in particular tracking cookies. You can disable cookies by adding one line in the Matomo Javascript code.

  11. Creating the tool of your dreams by developing your own plugins and getting access to the API

  Matomo is an open platform that lets you extend and customise the tracking ; reporting ; and user interface to your needs and to protect your visitors’ privacy the way you want or need it. Learn more in the Matomo Developer Zone. You may also have a look at our Matomo Marketplace where you can find several free and premium features to extend your Matomo.

  12. Transparency

  By default, all information and all collected data in your Matomo server are protected and nobody can access it. However, Matomo allows you to optionally make your collected data public and you can export any Matomo report including the whole dashboard to embed it into your website. This way you can show your users exactly which information you track. When you decide to make reports public, we do our best to protect privacy and automatically hide any Personally Identifiable Information such as the Visitor Profile and we make sure to not show any Visitor IP address and the Visitor ID.

  Bonus tip – A privacy policy template for you

  When you use Matomo to track your visitors, we recommend you update your Privacy Policy to explain how Matomo is used and what data it gathers. Here’s a Privacy Policy template for you to copy on your site.

  Continuous privacy improvements

  We are always interested in improving the privacy. If you miss any feature or have an idea on how to improve the privacy, please let us know.

  More information about all the Matomo features

  If you want to learn more about all the features in Matomo, have a look at our User Guides and FAQ entries.