We've set up a web analytic tool, Matomo, to collect data to improve our platform without compromising on the privacy of our visitors.
User tracking
Our web analytics tool can be configured to be GDPR compliant. We ensure data collected is anonymous by using anonymization and disabling cookies usage.
We can still monitor how our website is used and what are the most visited pages, while removing any opt-out for tracking visitors to improve the user experience.
Also, by using Matomo, we keep control over data processing: data about visits and other statistics are processed on our server and are not shared with any third-party. Many websites (most of them) use Google Analytics for this task, sending their visitors' data to Google servers for further processing for Google's benefit.
Web analytics vs server logs
We've worked with only server logs until now. Is there a real advantage of using a web analytics tool instead of just server logs ? What are the additional data Matomo generates ?
We mainly want to know how many visitors we have on our different pages. Server logs show this informations clearly. A web analytics tool also, but enriches it with the average time spent on a page, what is the page previously visited on the platform before another one, which website is sending us traffic...
A web analytics tool is even more useful to monitor a particular behaviour on a website: we will soon offer an e-learning module publicly accessible. We need to know how many visitors complete the e-learning module, but without user restricted pages or individual tracking. Server logs would not be enough for us to identify this kind of usage, but an analytics tool will give us more information.
Future steps
We will soon release the good practices map and start working on the e-learning modules. It will be a real challenge to work on this kind of features on a static website built with Gatsby.