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• What is data anonymization in web analytics ?

  11 février 2020, par Joselyn Khor — Analytics Tips, Privacy
  Collecting information via web analytics platforms is needed to help a website grow and improve. When doing so, it’s best to strike a balance between getting valuable insights, and keeping the trust of your users by protecting their privacy.

  This means not collecting or processing any personally identifiable information (PII). But what if your organisation requires you to collect PII ?

  That’s where data anonymization comes in.

  

  What is data anonymization ?

  Data anonymization makes identifiable information unidentifiable. This is done through data processing techniques which remove or modify PII data. So data becomes anonymous and can’t be linked to any individual.

  In the context of web analytics, data anonymization is handy because you can collect useful data while protecting the privacy of website visitors.

  Why is data anonymization important ?

  Through modern threats of identity theft, credit card fraud and the like, data anonymization is a way to protect the identity and privacy of individuals. As well as protect private and sensitive information of organisations. 

  Data anonymization lets you follow the many laws around the world which protect user privacy. These laws provide safeguards around collecting personal data or personally identifiable information (PII), so data anonymization is a good solution to ensure you’re not processing such sensitive information.

  In some cases, implementing data anonymization techniques means you can avoid having to show your users a consent screen. Which means you may not need to ask for consent in order to track data. This is a bonus as consent screens can annoy and stop people from engaging with your site.

  GDPR and data anonymization

  

  The GDPR is a law in the EU that limits the collection and processing of personal data. The aim is to give people more control over their online personal information. Which is why website owners need to follow certain rules to become GDPR compliant and protect user privacy. According to the GDPR, you can be fined up to 4% of your yearly revenue for data breaches or non-compliance. 

  In the case of web analytics, tools can be easily made compliant by following a number of steps. 

  This is why anonymizing data is a big deal.

  Anonymized data isn’t personal data according to the GDPR : 

  “The principles of data protection should therefore not apply to anonymous information, namely information which does not relate to an identified or identifiable natural person or to personal data rendered anonymous in such a manner that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable.”

  This means, you still get the best of both worlds. By anonymizing data, you’re still able to collect useful information like visitor behavioural data.

  US privacy laws and data anonymization

  In the US, there isn’t one single law that governs the protection of personal data, called personally identifiable information (PII). There are hundreds of federal and state laws that protect the personal data of US residents. As well as, industry-specific statutes related to data privacy, like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

  Website owners in the US need to know exactly what laws govern their area of business in order to follow them.

  A general guideline is to protect user privacy regardless of whether you are or aren’t allowed to collect PII. This means anonymizing identifiable information so your website users aren’t put at risk.

  Data anonymization techniques in Matomo Analytics

  If you carry these out, you won’t need to ask your website visitors for tracking consent since anonymized data is no longer considered personal data under the GDPR.

  • Anonymize previously tracked raw data – like visitors/visits
  • Anonymize Visitor IP addresses
  • Anonymize geo-location information (country, region, city)
  • Pseudonymize User ID ( if you don’t want this data to land on your Matomo server, the solution is simply to not set the User ID. Then Matomo will use the normal anonymized IDs)
  • Data can also be anonymized before it’s even sent to Matomo
  • Learn how to further configure privacy settings in a web analytics tool like Matomo
  • 11 ways Matomo Analytics helps you to protect your visitors privacy

  The techniques listed above make it easy for you when using a tool like Matomo, as they are automatically anonymized.

  Tools like Google Analytics on the other hand don’t provide some of the privacy options and leave it up to you to take on the burden of implementation without providing steps.

  Data anonymization tools

  If you’re a website owner who wants to grow your business or learn more about your website visitors, privacy-friendly tools like Matomo Analytics are a great option. By following the easy steps to be GDPR compliant, you can anonymize all data that could put your visitors at risk.

• Why do you need analytics for your WordPress ?

  7 avril 2020, par Joselyn Khor — Analytics Tips, Plugins
  Not many people know this, but having a WordPress analytics tool gives you a competitive advantage. It’s also essential to the growth of your website. For many businesses, websites are the main driver of revenue and sales. In the case of blogs, it’s your first chance to make a lasting impression.

  Now, maybe you’ve heard of Google Analytics or even the privacy-friendly alternative, Matomo Analytics, but have never tried them ? These are analytics platforms that help you understand your website traffic and visitors. (You can find these platforms as plugins in the WordPress directory !)

  They’re important because the insights you get help you determine what changes to make to improve your website. Without them you could face a tougher time figuring out what’s working, what the issues are (and solving them before they get out of hand), and making sure you’re taking your website in the right direction. 

  WordPress analytics gives you an understanding of what’s actually going on.

  How does a WordPress analytics plugin benefit your website ?

  What this means for you is getting a toolkit to learn how to get more sales or followers and subscribers (aka conversions in analytics terms). 

  By getting insights into user behaviour, content performance, and how you can optimise your website, you can reach more of your goals, like increasing sales or growing your audience.

  A WordPress analytics tool helps you get more traffic to your site

  You get a range of features which tell you which acquisition channels are working for you like – social media, search engines, and other websites mentioning you. This helps you make an informed decision on where to focus energies (or spend) to get more of the ideal people coming through to your website. 

  

  Example : Looking through your acquisition channels and seeing that Reddit drives a lot of traffic through to your website. Since this channel seems to be working for you, you could then spend more time on Reddit posts to increase traffic.

  But getting more traffic isn’t all there is to it. Once they land on your site, you want them to stay for a little longer so they are intrigued by what you’re offering. Be it a product, or awesome content.

  Which leads us to …

  Increasing engagement by learning about visitor behaviour

  When you get a solid number of visitors on your website, it’s good to then learn about how they behave on your site. A WordPress analytics tool helps with engagement since you’re seeing what’s appealing to them, and what isn’t.

   Increasing engagement is good for a few reasons. 

  • You end up speaking the language of your readers. 
  • You can make a difference with the information you’re putting out. 
  • You get loyal customers and believers in your organisation. 

  With more engaged visitors, you can build trust with them and eventually be able to convince them that your product, service, or blog is needed in their lives.

  

  Example : Looking through entry and exit pages to see what first impression is making them stay, and what impression is making them leave. This helps you redirect efforts to give your website a better chance of getting visitors to stay longer.

  Improving your content and engagement can lead to more conversions

  After you get visitors engaged, it’s time to convert. 

  Whether you have an ecommerce site or freelance blog, you’ll need to know how to boost conversions. This simply means getting people to achieve more of the actions you’re wanting them to take on your site. Like subscribing to your newsletter or adding items to a cart.

  With conversion optimization features, you’re finding out how well your website is designed to get buyers through a journey to conversion. 

  

  Example : Say you’ve created a newsletter sign up page, but you’re not getting as many sign ups as you’d like. With a web analytics tool, you can look into it further. A funnels feature could tell you how they’re getting to that page. If people can’t find your page, that could be reason for low conversion rates. Or, maybe you are getting people landing on this page, but you can’t tell why they’re not signing up. Try setting up a heatmap to see how far they’re scrolling down your page to the sign up section. Through these conversion optimization features, you can make tweaks that significantly improve conversions.

  So, how does the Matomo Analytics for WordPress plugin help with all of this ?

  

  Matomo Analytics for WordPress is a free web analytics plugin that gives you access to all the features mentioned above, right in your own WordPress dashboard. It’s completely free to use and is handy for users of all skill levels. From beginners right through to advanced analysts. 

  You get to move through all the stages to increase traffic, increase engagement, and convert. By using Matomo for WordPress, you put yourself in a better position to track all the needed data from your WordPress website. 

  You have this toolkit to improve your website for free, with a few clicks ! 

  By getting useful insights like visitors, acquisitions, bounce rates etc. you gain a new perspective on how to improve your website so it’s better at doing what you created it to do. Getting these insights also means giving yourself the confidence to do what’s best for your website in a data-driven way. 

  With all this knowledge, you can be competitive, or grow enough that you’re leaving your competitors in the dust. 

• How to Track Website Visitors : Benefits, Tools and FAQs

  31 août 2023, par Erin — Analytics Tips, Marketing

  Businesses spend a ton of time, money and effort into creating websites that are not only helpful and captivating, but also highly effective at converting visitors. They’ll create content, revise designs, add new pages and change forms, all in the hope of getting visitors to stay on the site and convert into leads or customers.

  When you track website visitors, you can see which of your efforts are moving the needle. While many people are familiar with pageviews as a metric, website visitor tracking can be much more in-depth and insightful.

  In this article, we’ll cover how website visitor tracking works, what you can track, and how this information can improve sales and marketing results. We’ll also explain global privacy concerns and how businesses can choose the right tracking software. 

  What is website visitor tracking ? 

  Website visitor tracking uses software and applications to track and analyse how visitors interact with your website. It’s a vital tool to help businesses understand whether their website design and content are having the desired effect.

  

  Website visitor tracking includes very broad, non-specific data, like how many times visitors have come to your site. But it can also get very specific, with personal information about the user and even recordings of their visit to your site. Site visits, which may include visiting several different pages of the same site, are often referred to as “sessions.”

  Although Google Analytics is the most widely used website visitor tracking software, it isn’t the most comprehensive or powerful. Companies that want a more in-depth understanding of their website may need to consider running a more precise tool alongside Google Analytics, like Matomo.

  As we’ll cover later, website tracking has many important business applications, but it also poses privacy and security concerns, causing some states and countries to impose strict regulations. Privacy laws and your company’s values should also impact what web analytics tool you choose.

  How website tracking works

  Website tracking starts with the collection of data as users interact with the website. Tracking technologies like cookies, JavaScript and pixels are embedded into web pages. These technologies then gather data about user behaviour, session details and user actions, such as pageviews, clicks, form submissions and more.

  More advanced tracking systems assign unique identifiers (such as cookies or visitor IDs) to individual users. This enables tracking of user journeys across multiple sessions and pages. These detailed journeys can often tell a different story and provide different insights than aggregated numbers do. 

  All this collected data is transmitted from the user’s browser to a centralised tracking system, which can be a third-party web analytics tool or a self-hosted solution. The collected data is stored in databases and processed to generate meaningful insights. This process involves organising the data, aggregating metrics, and creating reports.

  Analytics tools process the collected data to generate reports and visualisations that provide insights into user behaviour. Metrics such as pageviews, bounce rates, conversion rates and user paths are analysed. Good web analytics tools are able to present these insights in a user-friendly way. Analysts and marketing professionals then use this knowledge to make informed decisions to improve the user experience (UX).

  Advanced tracking systems allow data segmentation and filtering based on various criteria, such as user demographics, traffic sources, devices and more. This enables deeper analysis of specific user groups. For example, you might find that your conversion rate is much lower when your website is viewed on a mobile device. You can then dig deeper into that segment of data to find out why and experiment with changes that might increase mobile conversions.

  3 types of website tracking and their benefits

  There are three main categories of website tracking, and they each provide different information that can be used by sales, marketing, engineering and others. Here, we cover those three types and how businesses use them to understand customers and create better experiences.

  Website analytics 

  Website analytics is all about understanding the traffic your website receives. This type of tracking allows you to learn how the website performs based on pageviews, real-time traffic, bounce rate and conversions. 

  For example, you would use website analytics to determine how effectively your homepage drives people toward a product or pricing page. You can use pageviews and previous page statistics to learn how many people who land on your homepage read your blog posts. From there, you could use web analytics to determine the conversion rate of the call to action at the end of each article.

  

  User behaviour

  While website analytics focuses on the website’s performance, user behaviour tracking is about monitoring and quantifying user behaviour. One of the most obvious aspects of user behaviour is what they click on, but there are many other actions you can track. 

  The time a user spends on a page can help you determine whether the content on the page is engaging. Some tracking tools can also measure how far down the page a user scrolls, which reveals whether some content is even being seen. 

  Session recordings are another popular tool for analysing user behaviour. They not only show concrete actions, like clicks, but can also show how the user moves throughout the page. Where do they stop ? What do they scroll right past ? This is one example of how user behaviour data can be quantitative or qualitative.

  Visitor information

  Tracking can also include gathering or uncovering information about visitors to your site. This might include demographic information, such as language and location, or details like what device a website visitor is using and on which browser they view your website. 

  This type of data helps your web and marketing teams make better decisions about how to design and format the site. If you know, for example, that the website for your business-to-business (B2B) software is overwhelmingly viewed on desktop computers, that will affect how you structure your pages and choose images. 

  Similarly, if visitor information tells you that you have a significant audience in France, your marketing team might develop new content to appeal to those potential customers.

  Use website visitor tracking to improve marketing, sales and UX 

  Website visitor tracking has various applications for different parts of your business, from marketing to sales and much more. When you understand the impact tracking has on different teams, you can better evaluate your company’s needs and build buy-in among stakeholders.

  Marketing

  At many companies, the marketing team owns and determines what kind of content is on your website. From landing pages to blog posts to the navigation bar, you want to create an experience that drives people toward making a purchase. When marketers can track website visitors, they can get a real look at how visitors respond to and engage with their marketing efforts. Pageviews, conversion rates and time spent on pages help them better understand what your customers care about and what messaging resonates.

  But web analytics can even help marketing teams better understand how their external marketing campaigns are performing. Tracking tools like Matomo reveal your most important traffic sources. The term “traffic source” refers to the content or web property from which someone arrives at your site. 

  For instance, you might notice that an older page got a big boost in traffic this month. You can then check the traffic sources, where you find that an influential LinkedIn user posted a link to the page. This presents an opportunity to adjust the influencer or social media aspects of your marketing strategy.

  

  Beyond traffic sources, Matomo can provide a visual user journey (also known as User Flow), showing which pages visitors tend to view in a session and even in what order they progress. This gives you a bird’s-eye view of the customer journey.

  Sales

  Just like your marketing team, your sales team can benefit from tracking and analysing website visitor information. Data about user behaviour and visitor demographics helps sales representatives better understand the people they’re talking to. Segmented visitor tracking data can even provide clues as to how to appeal to different buyer personas.

  Sales leadership can use web analytics to gauge interest over time, tie visitors to revenue and develop more accurate sales forecasts and goals. 

  

  And it’s not just aggregated website tracking data that your sales team can use to better serve customers. They can also use insights about an individual visitor to tailor their approach. Matomo’s Visits Log report and Visitor Profiles allow you to see which pages a prospect has viewed. This tells your sales team which products and features the prospect is most interested in, leading to more relevant interactions and more effective sales efforts.

  User experience and web development

  The way users interact with and experience your website has a big impact on their impression of your brand and, ultimately, whether they become customers. While marketing often controls much of a website’s content, the backend and technical operation of the site usually falls to a web development or engineering team. Website analytics and tracking inform their work, too.

  Along with data about website traffic and conversion rates, web development teams often monitor bounce rates (the percentage of people who leave your website entirely after landing on a page) and page load time (the time it takes for an individual web page to load for a user). Besides the fact that slow loading times inconvenience visitors, they can also negatively affect your search engine optimization (SEO).

  

  Along with session recordings, user experience teams and web developers may use heatmaps to find out what parts of a page draw a visitor’s attention and where they are most likely to convert or take some other action. They can then use these insights to make a web page more intuitive and useful.

  Visitor tracking and privacy regulations 

  There are different data privacy standards in other parts of the world, which are designed to ensure that businesses collect and use consumer data ethically. The most-discussed of these privacy standards is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was instituted by the European Union (EU) but affects businesses worldwide. However, it’s important to note that individual countries or states can have different privacy laws.

  Many privacy laws govern how websites can use cookies to track visitors. With a user’s consent, cookies can help websites identify and remember visitors. However, many web visitors will reject cookie consent banners. When this happens, analysts and marketers can’t collect information from these visitors and have to work with incomplete tracking data. Incomplete data leads to poor decision-making. What’s more, cookie consent banners can create a poor user experience and often annoy web visitors.

  With Matomo’s industry-leading measures to protect user privacy, France’s data protection agency (CNIL) has confirmed that Matomo is exempt from tracking consent in France. Matomo users have peace of mind knowing they can uphold the GDPR and collect data without needing to collect and track cookie consent. Only in Germany and the UK are cookie consent banners still required.

  Choosing user tracking software

  The benefits and value of tracking website visitors are enormous, but not all tracking software is equal. Different tools have different core functionalities. For instance, some focus on user behaviour over traditional web analytics. Others offer detailed website performance data but offer little in the way of visitor information. It’s a good idea to start by identifying your company’s most important tracking goals.

  Along with core features, look for useful tools to experiment with and optimise your website with. For example, Matomo enables A/B testing while many other tools do not.

  

  Along with users of your website, you also need to think about the employees who will be using the tracking software. The interface can have a big impact on the value you get from a tool. Matomo’s session recording functionality, for example, not only provides you with video but with a colour-coded timeline identifying important user actions.

  

  Privacy standards and compliance should also be a part of the conversation. Different tools use different tracking methods, impacting accuracy and security and can even cause legal trouble. You should consider which data privacy laws you are subject to, as well as the privacy expectations of your users.

  

  Some industries have especially high data security standards. Government and healthcare organisations, for example, may require visitor tracking software that is hosted on their premises. While there are many purely cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) tracking tools, Matomo is available both On-Premise (also known as self-hosted) and in the Cloud.

  Frequently asked questions

  Here are answers to some of people’s most common questions about tracking website visitors.

  Can you track who visited your website ?

  In most cases, tracking your website’s traffic is possible. Still, the extent of the tracking depends on the visitor-tracking technology you use and the privacy settings and precautions the visitor uses. For example, some technologies can pinpoint users by IP address. In other cases, you may only have access to anonymized data.

  Is it legal to track someone’s IP address ?

  It is legal for websites and businesses to track someone’s IP address in the sense that they can identify that someone from the same IP address is visiting a page repeatedly. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), IP addresses are considered personally identifiable information (PII). The GDPR mandates that websites only log and store a user’s IP address with the user’s consent.

  How do you find where visitors are clicking the most ?

  Heatmap tools are among the most common tools for learning where visitors click the most on your website. Heatmaps use colour-coding to show what parts of a web page users either click on or hover over the most.

  Unique tracking URLs are another way to determine what part of your website gets the most clicks. For example, if you have three links on a page that all go to the same destination, you can use tracking links to determine how many clicks each link generates.

  Matomo also offers a Tag Manager within the platform that lets you manage and unify all your tracking and marketing tags to find out where visitors are clicking.

  What is the best tool for website visitor tracking ?

  Like most tools, the best website visitor tracking tool depends on your needs. Each tool offers different functionalities, user interfaces and different levels of accuracy and privacy. Matomo is a good choice for companies that value privacy, compliance and accuracy.

  Tracking for powerful insights and better performance

  Tracking website visitors is now a well-ingrained part of business operations. From sales reps seeking to understand their leads to marketers honing their ad spend, tracking helps teams do their jobs better.

  Take the time to consider what you want to learn from website tracking and let those priorities guide your choice of visitor tracking software. Whatever your industry or needs, user privacy and compliance must be a priority.

  Find out how much detail and insight Matomo can give you with our free 21-day trial — no credit card required.