Seeking opinions on tracking feature - default only, default + Google Analytics or default + Matomo?

[Kchalk]

Keen to get your thought process when deciding between tracking solutions for your community.

Which option did you go for?

• Default only
• Default + Google Analytics
• Default + Matomo
• Others

For those who opted for GA, did you eventually see value by leveraging its rich features to analyze and improve your community?

Conversely, for those opted for Matomo for its open source and privacy features, were the features comparable, any integration issues etc?

I’m in the midst of setting up my first community and trying to weigh the pros and cons by tapping into your past experience. Thank you!

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

There’s also Plausible Analytics.

Add Plausible Analytics tracking to Discourse

To add support for Plausible Analytics to your Discourse instance First, add your domain to your Plausible Analytics instance and grab your tracking code. It should look something like this: <script async defer data-domain="community.example.com" src="https://plausible.example.com/js/plausible.js"></script> Next, you do need to make a modification for this to work with Discourse’s single-page Ember app. Change plausible.js to plausible.hash.js. The final result should look like this: <scr…

[Kchalk]

Just updating on my experience: After exploring Matomo and Google Analytics, ease of implementation definitely went to GA, given that Discourse admin has in-built support for it. Rich reporting features won me over as well, though privacy concerns still persist.

Decided to go for GA for now and revisit Matomo or Plausible (thanks @neil) further down the road. Thank you for voting/contributing!

[yhh9xdq7d]

You should think about it first, because once you use it, you can no longer remove the data collected by Google even if you change to Matomo(or different privacy-focused solutions). In my opinion, Discourse’s built-in stats are already more than enough