Are these alternatives fully able to replace Google analytics?
I sort of thought Google analytics would tell you more about your visitors since with Google cookies, they could map them to other visited websites, centers of interest, age group, etc.
Are you loosing all that when switching to a less intrusive analytics platform such as this, or is Google analytics not leveraging their ability to disclose more about the visitors?
Google Analytics tells you more about your audience because it stalks people across the web. Matomo can never provide that without having a broad range of websites from which you collect data and writing custom code to annotate visitors with your own interest tags.
Matomo purely tracks analytics: who visited what page, for how long, from what device, from what location, from what inbound website, and what outbound links did they click. It also provides a log of pages requested per session so you can analyze people's flows through your website.
It's certainly not a replacement for Google Analytics if you use it to collect background information on your visitors. Even though Google's information is very broad (you mostly get ranges and the interests aren't that reliable), some marketeers use it to make decisions about their marketing strategies. Matomo won't help you there, your alternative would probably be Facebook or another big tech tracking solution.
It does provide a replacement for the type of tracking that I personally find acceptable, assuming the IP addresses are anonymized sufficiently. Matomo recommends shortening IP addresses to /16 after analysis, which I consider good enough, but that's a setting administrators can change.
What information exactly does GA tell you from stalking people across the web? I don't think Google sharing with you accurate information about the people visiting other websites would be completely legal (GDPR). Where exactly do you find this information in the dashboard?
It's off by default. Turning it on gives you basic demographic data but also means you consent to sharing your GA data with Google to use for advertising purposes.
Yes, that was my point, probably they get this data for themselves and improving their own services but as a webmaster you don't get all this data yourself.
Demographic data like: age (in buckets of 10 years), gender, household income for some countries, whether you're a parent [1] + Interests/"Affinities" [2]. I think these are derived from your Google search history and the sites you visit.
You do need to explicitly enable this in the GA dashboard, and ask users' consent under the GDPR.
Hey there, we are working on Pirsch [0] (another GA alternative).
If you can replace GA depends on your needs. GA collects more personal data, you get better insight of your audience. This is important if you do online marketing and like to see how well your campaigns perform. GA does track visitors across days and you can therefore see if someone came back after a week and made a purchase.
In case you don't do that or are simply not interested in specifics, all the alternatives are good enough right now, I think. You can still tell how visitors navigate your page, what content they visit most and all that stuff. We are currently thinking about what we can add to gain more insight for businesses, without invading privacy as Google does.
Only half the truth and a common misunderstanding. Define "visitor statistics". GDPR is about personal information, yes, but the cookie directive is also about tracking features in general. See the current so called "cookie verdict". To break it down: If you just count page impressions, you should be fine. Everything beyond is complicated. (Besides that, it does not matter where you host the data, on-premise or on foreign soil or if you use cookies or any other storing technology.)
Are these alternatives fully able to replace Google analytics?
I sort of thought Google analytics would tell you more about your visitors since with Google cookies, they could map them to other visited websites, centers of interest, age group, etc.
Are you loosing all that when switching to a less intrusive analytics platform such as this, or is Google analytics not leveraging their ability to disclose more about the visitors?