Web Analytics solution for Governments?

Matomo Core Team
January 15, 2013

Piwik’s increase in popularity is a huge reward to the team and a strength for the community! In the last 12 months, Matomo (Piwik) has seen +25% growth in the number of websites tracked, to reach 460,000+ websites.

Government agencies, Universities and NGOs have started to make the choice to use the open source analytics solution. Matomo is used by websites in all governmental areas, as of January 2013:

Cities such as Beijing.com.cn
Universities such as ucsb.edu, or science Laboratories such as llnl.gov
Agencies such as internet.gov.sa or afnic.fr
Governments such as gov.hk, primeminister.gov.gr, gov.kn or edu.cn

Is Matomo government?s ?open? alternative to Google Analytics?

We were asked this interesting question recently by Luke Fretwell from govfresh.com the “TechCrunch for government”. Matthieu replied to the interview: Is Matomo government?s ?open? alternative to Google Analytics?, addressing some of the security, privacy and scalability issues that might be of concern to those in the public sector interested in web analytics for governments.

We reproduce the article below:

Why would government consider an open source analytics software like Matomo when Google Analytics (and others like it) are already free?

One of the principle advantages of Matomo is that you are in control. Unlike remote-hosted services (such as Google Analytics), you host Matomo on your own server and the data is tracked inside your MySQL database. Because Matomo is installed on your server, you enjoy full control over your data. You can use it to track several websites, and even track Intranet sites and portals, a popular feature among government and universities.

For many government agencies (outside the United States), respecting the privacy of their citizens is a critical aspect, and it would be complicated to send their visitors data to Google for various reasons. When using Google Analytics, all traffic patterns are sent to Google, which can figure out a lot about these individuals from data mining across all websites in the world using Google Analytics (more than 60% of all websites). Laws like the Patriot Act in the United States makes it theoretically possible for the U.S. government to get access to this valuable data without due process.

Matomo is a great alternative for government to take back control of their data, respect their visitors? privacy and keep costs manageable. If you are using Google Analytics and starting to use Matomo, you can import your Google Analytics data history into Matomo.

Is there commercial support available?

We provide Matomo premium support as well as consultancy services for Matomo setup, special configuration, management of your Matomo and implementation of custom features (part of our roadmap or not, included in core or custom plugins).

In 2012 we have seen an impressive increase in popularity about Matomo, and we have been lucky to work with many customers (startups, big enterprise, web agencies, advertising networks) to implement and tune Matomo for their needs.

Also the community offers free support in our active Forums.

The product tracks visits, so can I set it up to comply with the government privacy rules?

Matomo is the leading web analytics software when it comes to respecting user privacy.

Privacy is ?built-in? Matomo, with four main features that enable advanced privacy policies:

Step 1) Automatically Anonymize Visitor IPs
Step 2) Delete Old Visitors Logs
Step 3) Include a Web Analytics Opt-Out Feature on Your Site (Using an iFrame)
Step 4) Respect DoNotTrack preference

Can it scale to handle the kind of traffic a government agency would get?

If you have a few hundreds visits/page views per day, Matomo should work fine ?out of the box.?

In the last year we have made major performance improvements. Matomo can now scale to millions of page views per month and/or to thousands of registered websites. At least two users even broke the one billion page view counter in Matomo.