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• 6 Crucial Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimisation

  26 février 2024, par Erin

  Whether investing time or money in marketing, you want the best return on your investment. You want to get as many customers as possible with your budget and resources.

  That’s what conversion rate optimisation (CRO) aims to do. But how does it help you achieve this major goal ? 

  This guide explores the concrete benefits of conversion rate optimisation and how they lead to more effective marketing and ROI. We’ll also introduce specific CRO best practices to help unlock these benefits.

  What is conversion rate optimisation ?

  Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of examining your website for improvements and creating tests to increase the number of visitors who take a desired action, like purchasing a product or submitting a form.

  The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a specific goal.

  

  In order to improve your conversion rate, you need to figure out :

  • Where your customers come from
  • How potential customers navigate or interact with your website
  • Where potential customers are likely to exit your site (or abandon carts)
  • What patterns drive valuable actions like sign-ups and sales

  From there, you can gradually implement changes that will drive more visitors to convert. That’s the essence of conversion rate optimisation.

  6 top benefits of conversion rate optimisation (and best practices to unlock them)

  Conversion rate optimisation can help you get more out of your campaigns without investing more. CRO helps you in these six ways :

  1. Understand your visitors (and customers) better

  The main goal of CRO is to boost conversions, but it’s more than that. In the process of improving conversion rates, you’ll also benefit by gaining deep insights into user behaviour, preferences, and needs. 

  Using web analytics, tests and behavioural analytics, CRO helps marketers shape their website to match what users need.

  Best practices for understanding your customer :

  First, analyse how visitors act with full context (the pages they view, how long they stay and more). 

  In Matomo, you can use the Users Flow report to understand how visitors navigate through your site. This will help you visualise and identify trends in the buyer’s journey.

  

  Then, you can dive deeper by defining and analysing journeys with Funnels. This shows you how many potential customers follow through each step in your defined journey and identify where you might have a leaky funnel. 

  

  In the above Funnel Report, nearly half of our visitors, just 44%, are moving forward in the buyer’s journey after landing on our scuba diving mask promotion page. With 56% of potential customers dropping off at this page, it’s a prime opportunity for optimising conversions.

  Think of Funnels as your map, and pages with high drop-off rates as valuable opportunities for improvement.

  Once you notice patterns, you can try to identify the why. Analyse the pages, do user testing and do your best to improve them.

  2. Deliver a better user experience

  A better understanding of your customers’ needs means you can deliver a better user experience.

  

  For example, if you notice many people spend more time than expected on a particular step in the sign-up process, you can work to streamline it.

  Best practices for improving your user experience : 

  To do this, you need to come up with testable hypotheses. Start by using Heatmaps and Session Recordings to visualise the user experience and understand where visitors are hesitating, experiencing points of frustration, and exiting. 

  You need to outline what drives certain patterns in behaviour — like cart abandonment for specific products, and what you think can fix them.

  

  Let’s look at an example. In the screenshot above, we used Matomo’s Heatmap feature to analyse user behaviour on our website. 

  Only 65% of visitors scroll down far enough to encounter our main call to action to “Write a Review.” This insight suggests a potential opportunity for optimisation, where we can focus efforts on encouraging more users to engage with this key element on our site.

  Once you’ve identified an area of improvement, you need to test the results of your proposed solution to the problem. The most common way to do this is with an A/B test. 

  This is a test where you create a new version of the problematic page, trying different titles, comparing long, and short copy, adding or removing images, testing variations of call-to-action buttons and more. Then, you compare the results — the conversion rate — against the original. With Matomo’s A/B Testing feature, you can easily split traffic between the original and one or more variations.

  

  In the example above from Matomo, we can see that testing different header sizes on a page revealed that the wider header led to a higher conversion rate of 47%, compared to the original rate of 35% and the smaller header’s 36%.

  Matomo’s report also analyses the “statistical significance” of the difference in results. Essentially, this is the likelihood that the difference comes from the changes you made in the variation. With a small sample size, random patterns (like one page receiving more organic search visits) can cause the differences.

  If you see a significant change over a larger sample size, you can be fairly certain that the difference is meaningful. And that’s exactly what a high statistical significance rating indicates in Matomo. 

  Once a winner is identified, you can apply the change and start a new experiment. 

  3. Create a culture of data-driven decision-making

  Marketers can no longer afford to rely on guesswork or gamble away budgets and resources. In our digital age, you must use data to get ahead of the competition. In 2021, 65% of business leaders agreed that decisions were getting more complex.

  CRO is a great way to start a company-wide focus on data-driven decision-making. 

  Best practices to start a data-driven culture :
  

  Don’t only test “hunches” or “best practices” — look at the data. Figure out the patterns that highlight how different types of visitors interact with your site.

  Try to answer these questions :

  • How do our most valuable customers interact with our site before purchasing ?
  • How do potential customers who abandon their carts act ?
  • Where do our most valuable customers come from ?

  Moreover, it’s key to democratise insights by providing multiple team members access to information, fostering informed decision-making company-wide.

  4. Lower your acquisition costs and get higher ROI from all marketing efforts

  Once you make meaningful optimisations, CRO can help you lower customer acquisition costs (CAC). Getting new customers through advertising will be cheaper.

  As a result, you’ll get a better return on investment (ROI) on all your campaigns. Every ad and dollar invested will get you closer to a new customer than before. That’s the bottom line of CRO.

  Best practices to lower your CAC (customer acquisition costs) through CRO adjustments :

  The easiest way to lower acquisition costs is to understand where your customers come from. Use marketing attribution to track the results of your campaigns, revealing how each touchpoint contributes to conversions and revenue over time, beyond just last-click attribution.

  You can then compare the number of conversions to the marketing costs of each channel, to get a channel-specific breakdown of CAC.

  This performance overview can help you quickly prioritise the best value channels and ads, lowering your CAC. But these are only surface-level insights. 

  You can also further lower CAC by optimising the pages these campaigns send visitors to. Start with a deep dive into your landing pages using features like Matomo’s Session Recordings or Heatmaps.

  They can help you identify issues with an unengaging user experience or content. Using these insights, you can create A/B tests, where you implement a new page that replaces problematic headlines, buttons, copy, or visuals.

  

  When a test shows a statistically significant improvement in conversion rates, implement the new version. Repeat this over time, and you can increase your conversion rates significantly, getting more customers with the same spend. This will reduce your customer acquisition costs, and help your company grow faster without increasing your ad budget.

  5. Improve your average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (CLV)

  CRO isn’t only about increasing the number of customers you convert. If you adapt your approach, you can also use it to increase the revenue from each customer you bring in. 

  But you can’t do that by only tracking conversion rates, you also need to track exactly what your customers buy.

  If you only blindly optimise for CAC, you even risk lowering your CLV and the overall profitability of your campaigns. (For example, if you focus on Facebook Ads with a $6 CAC, but an average CLV of $50, over Google Ads with a $12 CAC, but a $100 CLV.)

  Best practices to track and improve CLV :

  First, integrate your analytics platform with your e-commerce (B2C) or your CRM (B2B). This will help you get a more holistic view of your customers. You don’t want the data to stop at “converted.” You want to be able to dive deep into the patterns of high-value customers.

  The sales report in Matomo’s ecommerce analytics makes it easy to break down average order value by channels, campaigns, and specific ads.

  

  In the report above, we can see that search engines drive customers who spend significantly more, on average, than social networks — $241 vs. $184. But social networks drive a higher volume of customers and more revenue.

  To figure out which channel to focus on, you need to see how the CAC compares to the AOV (or CLV for B2B customers). Let’s say the CAC of social networks is $50, while the search engine CAC is $65. Search engine customers are more profitable — $176 vs. $134. So you may want to adjust some more budget to that channel.

  To put it simply :

  Profit per customer = AOV (or CLV) – CAC

  Example :

  • Profit per customer for social networks = $184 – $50 = $134
  • Profit per customer for search engines = $241 – $65 = $176

  You can also try to A/B test changes that may increase the AOV, like creating a product bundle and recommending it on specific sales pages.

  An improvement in CLV will make your campaigns more profitable, and help stretch your advertising budget even further.

  6. Improve your content and SEO rankings

  A valuable side-effect of focusing on CRO metrics and analyses is that it can boost your SEO rankings. 

  How ? 

  CRO helps you improve the user experience of your website. That’s a key signal Google (and other search engines) care about when ranking webpages. 

  

  For example, Google’s algorithm considers “dwell time,” AKA how long a user stays on your page. If many users quickly return to the results page and click another result, that’s a bad sign. But if most people stay on your site for a while (or don’t return to Google at all), Google thinks your page gives the user their answer.

  As a result, Google will improve your website’s ranking in the search results.

  Best practices to make the most of CRO when it comes to SEO :

  Use A/B Testing, Heatmaps, and Session Recordings to run experiments and understand user behaviour. Test changes to headlines, page layout, imagery and more to see how it impacts the user experience. You can even experiment with completely changing the content on a page, like substituting an introduction.

  Bring your CRO-testing mindset to important pages that aren’t ranking well to improve metrics like dwell time.

  Start optimising your conversion rate today

  As you’ve seen, enjoying the benefits of CRO heavily relies on the data from a reliable web analytics solution. 

  But in an increasingly privacy-conscious world (just look at the timeline of GDPR updates and fines), you must tread carefully. One of the dilemmas that marketing managers face today is whether to prioritise data quality or privacy (and regulations).

  With Matomo, you don’t have to choose. Matomo values both data quality and privacy, adhering to stringent privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.

  Unlike other web analytics, Matomo doesn’t sample data or use AI and machine learning to fill data gaps. Plus, you can track without annoying visitors with a cookie consent banner – so you capture 100% of traffic while respecting user privacy (excluding in Germany and UK).

  And as you’ve already seen above, you’ll still get plenty of reports and insights to drive your CRO efforts. With User Flows, Funnels, Session Recordings, Form Analytics, and Heatmaps, you can immediately find insights to improve your bottom line.

  And our built-in A/B testing feature will help you test your hypotheses and drive reliable progress. If you’re ready to reliably optimise conversion rates (with accuracy and without privacy concerns), try Matomo for free for 21 days. No credit card required.

  Try Matomo for Free

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

  
  

  Your email address
  

  Your website address
  

  Your Analytics subdomain will be .matomo.cloud (change)

  Choose your analytics subdomain
  

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  Your information will be used to create an account on our cloud service. For more information please consult our privacy policy.
  
  
  

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• 11 of the Most Effective Conversion Rate Optimisation Best Practices

  14 février 2024, par Erin

  Driving more traffic to your website is hard work, but it’s still only half the battle. 

  You don’t just need to acquire new users ; you need to make sure as many convert as possible to make your digital marketing efforts worthwhile.

  That’s why improving your site’s conversion rate is so important. It will also help you get more value from your existing traffic source and keep you in line with your competitors. It’s also probably a lot easier than you think — especially if you adopt optimisation strategies that have been proven to be profitable time and time again. 

  In this article, we’ll show some of the most powerful, innovative and tried-and-tested conversion rate optimisation strategies you can implement immediately. 

  What is conversion rate optimisation ?

  First, let’s look at what conversion rate optimisation means. Conversion rate optimisation is the practice of improving elements of your website to increase the number of users who take a desired action and turn visitors into customers. 

  Common conversion goals include :

  • Making a purchase
  • Adding an item to a shopping cart
  • Signing up for a newsletter
  • Registering for a free trial
  • Downloading an ebook
  • Watching a video

  It doesn’t matter what your goal is. Using one of the following conversion rate optimisation best practices can send your conversions soaring. 

  11 conversion rate optimisation best practices 

  Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work ? Then use one or more of the following best practices to improve your return on investment. 

  Set a clear goals and hypothesis

  When running an A/B or multivariate test, you need a clear idea of what you are testing and why. 

  A goal (a statement about what you want to achieve) and a hypothesis (a statement about what you expect to happen) clarify the problem you are trying to solve and give you a definitive way to judge the experiment’s results. 

  Confused ? Just use this template :

  We aim to [insert goal] by testing [insert test] on [insert page]. We expect that [insert test] will increase [insert metric] because [insert reason].

  Make sure your goals are directly related to the experiment. If you are testing your CTA button, the goal should be getting more users to click the button. It shouldn’t be a goal further down the conversion funnel, like making a purchase. 

  Start with A/B tests

  A/B testing is one of the easiest and most effective ways to run experiments to improve your current conversion rate. So, it’s no wonder that the A/B testing software market was expected to be worth $1.2 billion in 2023 and hit $3.6 billion by 2033. 

  Also known as split testing, A/B testing allows you to directly compare the conversion performance of two elements on your page, like the colour of your CTA button or your headline copy.

  

  You can go even further with multivariate testing, which lets you test two or more changes against a single control. 

  For example, the screenshot above shows the results of a multivariate test between a standard header, a wide header and a small header using Matomo’s A/B testing tool. As you can see, the wider header has a much higher conversion, and the increase was statistically significant. 

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  Tweak your CTAs

  Calls to action (CTAs) are page elements that prompt users to respond immediately. They are usually buttons but can also be images or plain text links. 

  What your CTAs say, how they look, and where they are placed can greatly impact your site’s conversion rates. As such, this is one of the elements you’ll want to optimise first. 

  There are several tweaks you can test, including your CTA’s :

  • Colour 
  • Length 
  • Copy
  • Placement 

  You can even test the impact of removing CTA banners and using text-based CTAs on your conversion rates.

  You should test out personalising CTAs, too. Research shows that personalised CTAs perform 202% better than standard calls to action. 

  Revise your web copy

  You can use several strategies to improve your website’s copy and generate more conversions. 

  Optimising copy for search engines can increase traffic and generate more conversions, for example. But that shouldn’t make your copy any less impactful. Bear search engines in mind, by all means, but make sure you are speaking to the needs and desires of your potential customers. Your copy needs to convince users that your product can solve their problems. 

  Nowhere is this more important than your headlines. These will be the first thing users read, so make sure they sell your USP and highlight pain points.

  Don’t just guess at the kind of messaging that will move the needle, however. Constantly test new headlines and continue doing so even after you’ve started seeing success. The results may surprise you. TruckersReport, a site that helps people become truck drivers, boosted opt-ins by 21.7% by revising its landing page headline, among other changes. 

  Make sure there are no spelling mistakes in your copy, either. Misspelt words, poor grammar and bad formatting make your website look unprofessional and untrustworthy. Even if the rest of your copy is incredibly enticing, these rookie errors can be enough to turn customers off. 

  Simplify your site’s navigation

  A website’s navigation is an often overlooked factor in conversion rate optimisation, but simplifying it can make it much easier for users to take action. 

  If you’ve ever used a poorly designed e-commerce store, you know how confusing and overwhelming bad navigation can be. Research shows that a whopping 82% of stores don’t divide their navigation into manageable chunks. 

  The trick is to simplify your navigation as much as possible. As you can see in the screenshot below, our navigation only has five headers and a call to action. It’s easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, and you can’t miss the big green CTA button. 

  

  Alternatively, you can test what happens when you completely remove your navigation. Brands usually do this on landing pages where the only action they want the user to take is to make a purchase. 

  

  It’s exactly the strategy we’ve used on our free trial landing page. 

  Leverage heatmaps

  Analytics tools — and heatmaps in particular — can help you understand user behaviour and optimise accordingly. 

  Heatmaps are a visual representation of user interaction on your page. Red and yellow represent high levels of user interaction, and blue and green represent low levels of interaction.

  

  As you can see in the screenshot above, our CTA button has some of the highest levels of engagement on the page, telling us that it’s well-positioned. Given the focus on the site’s navigation, we can also assume we are correct to have a CTA button in there — something we can confirm using our web analytics to see how many users click on it.

  Reduce load time

  Speed matters when it comes to conversions. Fact. 

  Research shows a huge difference in conversion rates between quick and slow sites. For example, a site that loads in one second converts three times better than a site that loads in five seconds. 

  That’s why using a web analytics tool is vital to understand page load times and act accordingly if you think slow speeds are hampering your conversions.

  

  Identifying your slowest pages is easy with Matomo. Just sort your pages by the Avg. Use the page load time metric on the page performance report to identify the pages you want to drive conversions. 

  Next, take steps to improve your page’s load time by :

  • Compressing images
  • Compressing code files or using a more lightweight theme
  • Removing unnecessary plugins
  • Using a content delivery network
  • Improving your hosting

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  Add more trust signals

  Trust is essential when you’re trying to convince customers to make a purchase. In fact, consumers rate trust as one of the top three buying factors, far above a brand’s reputation and whether they love the brand. 

  Adding trust signals to your landing pages, such as customer testimonials, customer reviews, case studies, and other forms of social proof, can transform your conversion rates. If consumers see real people and businesses buy from you, they’ll feel reassured to do the same.

  

  It’s a strategy we use ourselves. Just look at the screenshot from our homepage above. Immediately after our free trial CTA, we display the logos of well-known brands that use our product. 

  Security-focused trust signals are also powerful if you are an online store. Installing an SSL certificate, showing logos of trusted payment providers (like PayPal and Mastercard) can convince people they are spending money at a legitimate store.

  Improve your site’s mobile experience

  More and more people are accessing the internet via their smartphones. In 2022, for instance, there were five billion unique mobile Internet users, meaning more than 60% of the internet population used a smartphone to browse online. 

  Moreover, 76% of U.S. adults make purchases using their smartphones. 

  That means you need to ensure your site’s mobile experience is on-point to increase conversions. 

  Your site should use a mobile-first design, meaning it works perfectly on smartphones and then scales up for desktop users. 

  Trust the data

  Opinions are a fantastic form of inspiration for new A/B tests. But they should never be trusted over cold, hard data. If your test shows the opposite of what you and your team thought would happen, then trust the data and not yourself.

  With that in mind, ensure you collect qualitative and quantitative data during your experiments. Web analytics should always form the backbone of conversion tests, but don’t forget to also use heatmaps, screen recordings, and customer surveys. 

  Keep testing

  There’s no such word as “finished” in the world of A/B testing. Continual testing is key if you want to convert more website visitors. 

  Make sure you aren’t stopping tests prematurely, either. Make sure every A/B and multivariate test reaches a sample size that makes the test statistically significant. 

  Understand your users better with Matomo 

  Whether you run an e-commerce store, a SaaS company, or a service-based business, implementing these conversion rate optimisation best practices could be an easy way to lower your bounce rate and boost your conversion rates.

  But remember, best practices aren’t clear-cut rules. What works for one website may not work for yours. That’s why running your own tests and understanding your visitors’ behaviour is important. 

  Matomo’s web analytics platform is the perfect tool for doing just that. Not only does it come with the tools you need to optimise your conversion rate (like an A/B testing tool, heatmaps and session recordings), but you can also trust the data. Unlike Google Analytics 4 and other tools, Matomo doesn’t use data sampling meaning you have 100% accurate data from which to make better decisions. It’s GDPR compliant and can run cookieless, so no need for cookie consent banners (excluding in the UK and Germany).

  Discover how you can improve your website’s conversions with Matomo by starting a free 21-day trial, no credit card required.

  Try Matomo for Free

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

  
  

  Your email address
  

  Your website address
  

  Your Analytics subdomain will be .matomo.cloud (change)

  Choose your analytics subdomain
  

  .matomo.cloud

  I accept the terms and conditions and data processing agreement (DPA)

  
  Your information will be used to create an account on our cloud service. For more information please consult our privacy policy.
  
  
  

  Start improving your websites now

  

• Matomo vs WP-Statistics – which web analytics plugin suits you best ?

  2 avril 2020, par Joselyn Khor — Analytics Tips, Plugins

  Due to the endless choices, you may be wondering which web analytics plugin (GA, Slimstat or WP-Statistics) to choose from on the WordPress directory. If the choice is between WP-Statistics and Matomo for WordPress, we’ve got you covered. Have a look at which could be the best option for you. Our team tested the WP-Statistics plugin to see how it compares. It’s hard not to be biased, but we’ll try our best to give you a fair assessment.

  The main considerations in this article : 

  • General overview
  • General comparison
  • Similarities
  • Differences
  • Three notable feature category comparisons
  • Which tool suits you better ?

  General overview

  What’s Matomo Analytics for WordPress ?

  Matomo for WordPress is a free, privacy-friendly web analytics plugin that lets you understand website visitors and how they behave on your site. With comprehensive insights, you get the opportunity to increase conversions, and the know-how to improve your website. 

  It lets you undertake essential analysis by tracking information, such as, where visitors are coming from, what your most popular pages are, and how visitors are using your site.

  In addition to the fundamentals, the tool also allows for advanced tracking and analysis with features that give you a full understanding of behavioural patterns and website performance. This enables you to optimise your WordPress website to increase sales or engagement.

  It offers a complete analytics package with the bonuses of 100% data ownership, no data sampling, and GDPR compliance. 

  What’s WP-Statistics ?

  WP-Statistics is currently the most used self-hosted WordPress statistics plugin. It provides reports that let you analyse who your visitors are, where they’re coming from, and to an extent what they’re doing on your website.

  Like Matomo for WordPress, it gives you an understanding of your audience which helps you make decisions on how to improve your website for more conversions. 

  As it’s self-hosted on your own WordPress servers it can be seen as a privacy-friendly choice with a few tweaks (more on this below).

  Like Matomo for WordPress, it gives you an understanding of your audience which helps you make decisions on how to improve your website for more conversions. 

  General comparison

  Let’s compare the installation process and the dashboards that get installed in your WordPress.

  Installation

  Both Matomo and WP-Statistics are installed directly in your WordPress so you’ll be able to see your analytics reports right in your WordPress dashboard. You can install them both straight from the WordPress Directory.

  The installation process for both plugins is beginner-friendly. You simply need to find them on the WordPress directory, click on ‘Install Now’, and tracking should start immediately in your WordPress dashboard.

  Dashboard

  For the main Matomo platform you’ll see :

  • Visitors – Overview, Visits Log, Real-time, Real-time Map, Locations, Devices, Software, Times, User IDs, Custom Variables, User Type
  • Behaviour – Pages, Entry Pages, Exit Pages, Page titles, Site Search, Outlinks, Downloads, Events, Contents, Engagement, Transitions, Users Flow, Top Paths, Page Author, Page Location, Page Type, Crawling errors
  • Acquisition – Overview, All Channels, Search Engine & Keywords, Websites, Social Networks, Campaigns, Campaign URL Builder, Crawling overview
  • Ecommerce – Overview, Ecommerce Log, Products, Sales, Multi Attribution
  • Goals – Overview, Multi Attribution, Choose Goals, Manage Goals
  • These may be worded differently from WP-Statistics, but they show you all the information you need to know about your traffic, pages, etc.

  Previous

  Next

  In the dashboard for WP-Statistics you’ll see :

  • Overview, Hits, Online, Referrers, Search Words, Search Engines, Pages, Visitors, Categories, Tags, Authors, Browsers, Top Visitors Today
  • These are the only things you can see in the dashboard. So you can’t click into them for a drop down section to get deeper insights. 
  •  

  

  Key similarities between Matomo and WP-Statistics

  • Free to use
  • Self-hosted – All data collected is stored only within your own servers, no third parties have rights over your data, and logs or report data will never be sent to other servers. 
  • Beginner-friendly – Both offer simple reporting for people who are very much beginners and only want basic insights. With Matomo the advantage is also that you can get more details should you ever want/need to.

  Key differences between Matomo and WP-Statistics

  The main differences fall in these categories : features, privacy, documentation/support, security, active development, extensibility, price and ads.

  Features : 

  WP-Statistics – On a fundamental level, WP-Statistics is focused on simplicity and the basics. There are fewer reports than Matomo and they function on a level that suits beginners who are interested in seeing only the numbers of visitors on the website, and how often each page is viewed. 

  Matomo – provides an interface with similar simplicity. However, there is also a more feature-rich and more comprehensive user interface available. In addition to the basics, Matomo offers features like Goals, Ecommerce, in the free version which show a deeper level of insight. WP Statistics does not let you track essentials like Goals or Ecommerce.

  Privacy : 

  WP-Statistics – One of the concerns we wish to raise here is for data privacy. There doesn’t appear to be an opt-out option in WP-Statistics, which could be problematic for some privacy laws such as GDPR. There’s also no documentation on this.

  We were a bit concerned to see that WP-Statistics didn’t have IP anonymization enabled by default. Considering the IP address is personal data, it means you are not compliant with privacy laws such as the GDPR when you use this plugin unless you tweak the settings. They mentioned : “In previous versions, there was an option called Hash IP. When Hash IP was activated, the IP addresses wouldn’t be stored in the database, but instead, a unique hash would be used. In this new version, an option has been added to store IPs anonymously. This option is active by default.” However, when we installed this and tested it on multiple WordPress installations, this option was not active by default. 

  Matomo – has more measures in place to ensure privacy is respected, such as, opt-outs. Due to the stringent privacy features in place, Matomo is well equipped to ensure GDPR compliance. Matomo has an abundance of user guides and FAQs you can follow to configure your platform to fully comply with GDPR. There’s even an 12-step compliant checklist. The most compelling proof is that the leading voice on GDPR – The European Commission uses Matomo Analytics. 

  Documentation/Support : 

  WP-Statistics – has little documentation, FAQs, and no support.

  Matomo – has thousands of FAQs and user guides, as well as a dedicated support team and forum you can turn to for help. Should you ever run into any issue, this might be something important to consider.

  The contrast in support between WP-Statistics and Matomo for WordPress :

  

  

  Security :

  Matomo takes protecting your data very seriously. We have a security bounty programme giving security researchers money should they find any security issues. Matomo also performs a security review for every new release. We couldn’t find anything similar in WP-Statistics.

  Active development : 

  WP Statistics – doesn’t seem to have active development. The last change in this plugin was over three months ago (source : https://github.com/wp-statistics/wp-statistics/commits/master) and in general, only 10 people really contributed to it (source : https://github.com/wp-statistics/wp-statistics/graphs/contributors, the graphs shows little contributor activity.) 

  Matomo – has been built by hundreds of contributors (source : https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/graphs/contributors), and is actively maintained by multiple developers including developers who work on this full time. This means you can rest assured that Matomo will be there for you in the future, it will receive regular improvements.

  Extensibility :

  WP-Statistics – have a section on their website offering customisation but for a price. 

  Matomo – should you want any changes and have some developer knowledge or some developers at hand, you can completely customise and extend Matomo for free. There are also one hundred additional plugins available for Matomo for free. 
  

  Price :

  The main WordPress plugins ‘WP Statistics‘ and ‘Matomo Analytics – Ethical Stats. Powerful Insights.‘ are both free.

  WP Statistics and Matomo also sell paid add-ons. However, WP-Statistics’ paid add-ons are ones already integrated in Matomo for free. These basic features are provided as the development team believe they’re necessities to a fully functional analytics platform. 

  Ads :

  WP Statistics shows you ads, whereas Matomo doesn’t.

  Three most notable feature category comparisons

  Both Matomo and WP-Statistics have basic tracking categories in the WP dashboard. In addition, Matomo has feature categories that can be expanded e.g. when clicked, Visitors drops down to reveal 11 more features. 

  We’ll compare three feature categories : Visitors, Behaviour, and Acquisitions.

  1. Visitors (WP-Statistics) vs Visitors (Matomo)

  Let’s dive into how each analytics platform provides insight into the visitors feature category.

  WP-Statistics

  

  WP-Statistics – We can see WP-Statistics gives you bare bones tracking capabilities so you don’t get a really detailed picture of your visitors. It allows you to monitor users currently online in real-time, which is useful to look at the most recent activity on your site. WP-Statistics doesn’t offer a dropdown section to see more about your visitor’s behavioural patterns. There is no Visitors category in WP-Statistics, just individual features in the dashboard but we can group three options together to compare with Matomo’s Visitors category, these are : Online, Browsers, Top Visitors Today.

  Matomo

  

  

  Comparison

  Matomo – In comparison, Matomo has a Visitors category with a dropdown list that lets you drill deeper into what your visitors are doing. It lets you evaluate every action an individual user has taken on your website which is compiled into a full historical profile. Matomo gives an in-depth view. E.g. you can look at individual visit logs, locations, and devices.

  This lets you see what the life-time journey of an active user looks like, or perhaps you want to see what a profile looks like for a user who comes back time-and-time again without ever purchasing ; there is no better way to gain insights to these journeys and this is why the Visitor Profiles feature is so widely used by Matomo users.

  2. Pages tracking (WP-Statistics) vs Behaviour (Matomo)

  For this comparison, WP-Statistics has a few features that can be combined to compare with Matomo’s Behaviour category. 

  WP-Statistics

  

  The Pages section in WP-Statistics gives a basic look at your most popular pages so you know which pages get more visits and those which aren’t performing. This helps with content improvement. You can also see other features in this Behaviour category like Browsers and Hits – these also provide basic stats to help you get a general sense of visitor behaviour. 

  Matomo

  

  Comparison :

  Matomo on the other hand has stats that go into greater detail. The features under the Behaviour section of the tool let you draw actionable conclusions e.g. seeing that a page has a higher exit rate than it’s supposed to, so you optimise that page to prevent people leaving and help them progress through your website. 

  Not only can you see popular pages, you can look at : which page people viewed first when they visited your website ; which page they left from ; what people search for on your site ; and see how people are flowing through pages. Most importantly you can see how each of these reports perform over time so you can improve engagement and conversions on your website.

  3. Referrers (WP-Statistics) vs Acquisition (Matomo)

  For this comparison, WP-Statistics has a few features that can be combined to compare with Matomo’s Acquisition category. 

  WP-Statistics

  

  WP-Statistics gives you Referrers, Search Words, and Search Engines. Which give a basic understanding of the channels that work best for you. This is helpful to know where to focus more of your attention.

  Matomo

  

  Comparison :

  With Matomo you see multiple layers of stats to understand how your acquisition channels are performing. So you can see tables of data that drill into visits, downloads, bounce rate, and newsletter sign ups. For example seeing that Facebook is the channel bringing in the most visitors to your site. This gives you a better sense of which acquisition strategy is working for your site. 

  Who suits WP-Statistics

  This is a great starter pack for people who want a lightweight, functional statistics plugin that gives you a basic overview of website hits and visitors. It’s very easy to use, so it’s great for beginners and those who want simple tracking. If you have basic goals for your website or blog’s success then WP-Statistics is enough for you to get numbers on visitors, page views, and hits, but won’t be suitable for a larger-scale business or organisation. 

  It’s suited for hobby websites, blogs, and freelancers who want simple, effective stats tracking, who don’t need detailed insights on site performance or tracking. 

  Who suits Matomo

  Matomo can be used for the same basic reporting, but has the capability for you to go deeper into more advanced reporting in a different UI if you need it. It’s an option that can work for a wider range of users – from beginners to analysts. There are features to suit all skill levels. This complete suite of features makes it a more comprehensive tool, as you can get more out of it. Ideal not only for bloggers and beginners, but also powerful enough to suit businesses, privacy-respecting organisations, and those who would benefit from conversion optimisation features. 

  You can draw insights from all stages of the customer journey – you’ll track behavioural patterns as soon as visitors enter your site, to their progression through your site, and ultimately to conversion and exit. It’s also an ethical choice because you get 100% data ownership. 

  If you’d like to look deeper into your data then Matomo would also be suitable for you. Matomo’s UI is lean, very easy to learn and shouldn’t overwhelm users in the way another tool like Google Analytics might do. If you think Matomo suits you best, you can install it for free now.

  Advantages of using Matomo

  Truly privacy-respecting

  There’s no messing about when it comes to privacy. As a lot of users are based in Europe, Matomo adheres to the strictest privacy laws and can be counted on as a privacy-respecting tool that’s used by many government entities. Needing to comply with major privacy laws (GDPR) in Europe means Matomo can proudly ensure users are making the ethical choice.

  GDPR compliance

  You mitigate the risks of getting caught out and fined for breaching GDPR regulations. There’s a complete list of documentation, guides, information, and tools to make sure you’re on the right side of GDPR. 

  All-rounder

  Matomo gives you a clearer picture of your visitors which helps you make better decisions for your website overall. The support and documentation is thorough which means you get more out of your Matomo experience.

  Conclusion

  Both tools will do you justice in terms of fundamental reporting, but Matomo Analytics will outshine if you want a greater understanding of your website and want to carry out deeper levels of analysis.

  You can draw useful insights with WP-Statistics so it has to be said that they are doing something right with an entry-level offering. The simplicity is great, but you won’t really get more than a basic idea of how your site is performing.

  On the flipside, this simplicity could also be a double-edged sword for WP-Statistics in that it’s too simplistic to draw actionable insights. If you’re wanting to know anything that could increase sales, conversions or subscribers – then you wouldn’t really get the reports to do so. 

  WP-Statistics also falls short when it comes to updates and support. So a major difference can be seen in support, active development, ads, security, documentation, which many people may think about until they’re in trouble and find they need these resources. Matomo offers support, continuous product development, and extensive documentation. There are also no ads, making it more enjoyable to use.

  One thing we’d like to raise awareness about is WP-Statistics’ claims of being privacy-respecting without much documentation to back up those claims. There is a lack of privacy features which could put some website owners at risk of non-compliance. Just be sure to check that you’ve carried out the steps to comply with the privacy laws in your country.

  Matomo makes it clear that privacy is essential as is compliance to privacy laws like GDPR. The strength also lies in the peace of mind you get from a tool that’s used by global privacy leaders such as the European Commission.