Uncategorized Archives - Analytics Platform - Matomo

Export your data from Universal Analytics or Universal Analytics 360

Erin — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 23:42:16 +0000

How to export your data

We would love for you to try Matomo, but first let’s get your data from Google:

Import your data to Matomo

Your email address

Your website address

Your Analytics subdomain will be .matomo.cloud

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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.

Custom Segmentation Guide: How it Works & Segments to Test

Erin — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 22:36:57 +0000

Struggling to get the insights you’re looking for with premade reports and audience segments in your analytics?

Custom segmentation can help you better understand your customers, app users or website visitors, but only if you know what you’re doing.

You can derive false insights with the wrong segments, leading your marketing campaigns or product development in the wrong direction.

In this article, we’ll break down what custom segmentation is, useful custom segments to consider, how new privacy laws affect segmentation options and how to create these segments in an analytics platform.

What is custom segmentation?

Custom segmentation is when you divide your audience (customers, users, website visitors) into bespoke segments of your own design, not premade segments designed by the analytics or marketing platform provider.

To do this, you single out “custom segment input” — data points you will use to pinpoint certain users. For example, it could be everyone who has visited a certain page on your site.

Segmentation isn’t just useful for targeting marketing campaigns and also for analysing your customer data. Creating segments is a great way to dive deeper into your data beyond surface-level insights.

You can explore how various factors impact engagement, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value. These insights can help guide your higher-level strategy, not just campaigns.

How custom segments can help your business

As the global business world clamours to become more “data-driven,” even smaller companies collect all sorts of data on visitors, users, and customers.

However, inexperienced organisations often become “data hoarders” without meaningful insights. They have in-house servers full of data or gigabytes stored by Google Analytics and other third-party providers.

One way to leverage this data is with standard customer segmentation models. This can help you get insights into your most valuable customer groups and other standard segments.

Custom segments, in turn, can help you dive deeper. They help you unlock insights into the “why” of certain behaviours. They can help you segment customers and your audience to figure out:

Why and how someone became a loyal customer
How high-order-value customers interact with your site before purchases
Which behaviours indicate audience members are likely to convert
Which traffic sources drive the most valuable customers

This specific insight’s power led Gartner to predict that 70% of companies will shift focus from “big data” to “small and wide” by 2025. The lateral detail is what helps inform your marketing strategy.

You don’t need the same volume of data if you’re analysing and segmenting it effectively.

Custom segment inputs: 6 data points you can use to create valuable custom segments

To help you get started, here are six useful data points you can use as a basis to create segments — AKA customer segment inputs:

Visits to certain pages

A basic data point that’s great for custom segments is visits to certain pages. Create segments for popular middle-of-funnel pages and compare their engagement and conversion rates.

For example, if a user visits a case study page, you can compare their likelihood to convert vs. other visitors.

This is a type of behavioural segmentation, but it is the easiest custom segment to set up in terms of analysis and marketing efforts.

Visitors who perform certain actions

The other important type of behavioural segment is visitors or users who take certain actions. Think of things like downloading a file, clicking a link, playing a video or scrolling a certain amount.

For instance, you can create a segment of all visitors who have downloaded a white paper. This can help you explore, for example, what drives someone to download a white paper. You can look at the typical user journey and make it easier for them to access the white paper — especially if your sales reps indicate many inbound leads mention it as a key driver of their interest.

User devices

Device-based segmentation lets you compare engagement and conversion rates on mobile, desktop and tablets. You can also get insights into their usage patterns and potential issues with certain mobile elements.

This is one aspect of technographic segmentation, where you segment based on users’ hardware or software. You can also create segments based on browser software or even specific versions.

Loyal or high-value customers

The best way to get more loyal or high-value customers is to explore their journey in more detail. These types of segments can help you better understand your ideal customers and how they act on your site.

You can then use this insight to alter your campaigns or how you communicate with your target audience.

For example, you might notice that high-value customers tend to come from a certain source. You can then focus your marketing efforts on this source to reach more of your ideal customers.

Visitor or customer source

You need to track the results if you’re investing in marketing (like an influencer campaign or a sponsored post) outside platforms with their own analytics.

Before you can create a reliable segment, you need to make sure that you use campaign tracking parameters to reliably track the source. You can use our free campaign tracking URL builder for that.

Demographic segments — location (country, state) and more

Web analytics tools, such as Matomo, use visitors’ IP addresses to pinpoint their location more accurately by cross-referencing with a database of known and estimated IP locations. In addition, these tools can detect a visitor’s location through the language settings in their browser.

This can help create segments based on location or language. By exploring these trends, you can identify patterns in behaviour, tailor your content to specific audiences, and adapt your overall strategy to better meet the preferences and needs of your diverse visitor base.

How new privacy laws affect segmentation options

Over the past few years, new legislation regarding privacy and customer data has been passed globally. The most notable privacy laws are the GDPR in the EU, the CCPA in California and the VCDPA in Virginia.

For most companies, it can save a lot of work and future headaches to choose a GDPR-compliant web analytics solution not only streamlines operations, saving considerable effort and preventing future headaches, but also ensures peace of mind by guaranteeing the collection of compliant and accurate data. This approach allows companies to maintain compliance with privacy regulations while remaining firmly committed to a data-driven strategy.

Create your very own custom segments in Matomo (while ensuring compliance and data accuracy)

Crafting precise marketing messages and optimising ROI is crucial, but it becomes challenging without the right tools, especially when it comes to maintaining accurate data.

That’s where Matomo comes in. Our privacy-friendly web analytics platform is GDPR-compliant and ensures accurate data, empowering you to effortlessly create and analyse precise custom segments.

If you want to improve your marketing campaigns while remaining GDPR-compliant, start your 21-day free trial of Matomo. No credit card required.

10 Matomo Features You Possibly Didn’t Know About

Erin — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 02:06:21 +0000

Most users know Matomo as the privacy-focussed web analytics tool with data accuracy, superior to Google Analytics.

And we’re thrilled to be that — and more!

At Matomo, our underlying product vision is to provide a full stack of accurate, user-friendly and privacy-mindful online marketing tools.

Over the years, we’ve expanded beyond baseline website statistics. Matomo Cloud users also get to benefit from additional powerful tools for audience segmentation, conversion optimisation, advanced event tracking and more.

Here are the top 10 advanced Matomo features you wish you knew about earlier (but won’t stop using now!).

Funnels

At first glance, most customer journeys look sporadic. But every marketer will tell you that there is a method to almost every users’ madness. Or more precisely — there’s a method you can use to guide users towards conversions.

That’s called a customer journey — a schematic set of steps and actions people complete from developing awareness and interest in your solution to consideration and finally conversion.

On average, 8 touchpoints are required to turn a prospect into a customer. Though the number can be significantly bigger in B2B sales and smaller for B2C Ecommerce websites.

With the Funnels feature, you can first map all the on-site touchpoints (desired actions) for different types of customers. Then examine the results you’re getting as prospects move through these checkbox steps.

Funnel reports provide:

High-level metrics such as “Funnel conversion rate”, “Number of funnel conversions”, “Number of funnel entries”.
Drilled-down reports for each funnel and each tracked action within it. This way you can track the success rates of each step and estimate their contribution to the cumulative effect.

Segmented funnel reports for specific user cohorts (with Matomo Segmentation enabled).

What makes funnels so fun (pun intended)? The variety of use cases and configurations!

You can build funnels to track conversion rates for:

Newsletter subscriptions
Job board applications
Checkout or payment
Product landing pages
Seasonal promo campaigns

…. And pretty much any other page where users must complete a meaningful action. So go test this out.

Form Analytics

On-site forms are a 101 tactic for lead generation. For most service businesses, a “contact request” or a “booking inquiry” submission means a new lead in your pipeline.

That said: the average on-site form conversion rates across industries stand at below 50%:

Property – 37%
Telecoms – 40%
Software — 46.83%

That’s not bad, but it could be better. If only you could figure out why people abandon your forms….

Oh wait, Matomo Form Analytics can supply you with answers. Form Analytics provide real-time information on key form metrics — total views, starter rate, submitter rate, conversions and more.

Separately the average form hesitation time is also provided (in other words, the time a user contemplates if filling in a form is worth the effort). Plus, Matomo also tracks the time spent on form submission.

You can review:

Top drop-off fields – to understand where you are losing prospects. These fields should either be removed or simplified (e.g., with a dropdown menu) to increase conversions.
Most corrected-field – this will provide a clear indication of where your prospects are struggling with a form. Providing help text can simplify the process and increase conversions.
Unesserary fields – with this metric, you’ll know which optional fields your leads aren’t interested in filling in and can remove them to help drive conversions.

With Form Analytics, you’ll be able to boost conversions and create a better on-site experience with accurate user data.

A/B testing

Marketing is both an art and a science. A/B testing (or split testing) helps you statistically verify which creative ideas perform better.

A good conversion rate optimisation (CRO) practice is to test different elements and to do so often to find your top contenders.

What can you split test? Loads of things:

Page slogans and call-to-actions
Button or submission form placements
Different landing page designs and layouts
Seasonal promo offers and banners
Pricing information
Customer testimonial placements

More times than not, those small changes in page design or copy can lead to a double-digit lift in conversion rates. Accounting software Sage saw a 30% traffic boost after changing the homepage layout, copy and CTAs based on split test data. Depositphotos, in turn, got a 9.32% increase in account registration rate (CR) after testing a timed pop-up registration form.

The wrinkle? A/B testing software isn’t exactly affordable, with tools averaging $119 – $1,995 per month. Plus, you then have to integrate a third-party tool with your website analytics for proper attribution — and this can get messy.

Matomo saves you the hassle in both cases. An A/B testing tool is part of your Cloud subscription and plays nicely with other features — goal tracking, heatmaps, historic visitor profiles and more.

You can run split tests with Matomo on your websites or mobile apps — and find out if version A, B, C or D is the top performer.

Advertising Conversion Exports

A well-executed search marketing or banner remarketing campaign can drive heaps of traffic to your website. But the big question is: How much of it will convert?

The AdTech industry has a major problem with proper attribution and, because of it, with ad fraud.

Globally, digital ad fraud will cost advertisers a hefty $8 billion by the end of 2022. That’s when another $74 million in ad budgets get wasted per quarter.

The reasons for ad budget waste may vary, but they often have a common denominator: lack of reliable conversion tracking data.

Matomo helps you get a better sense of how you spend your cents with Advertising Conversion Reports. Unlike other MarTech analytics tools, you don’t need to embed any third-party advertising network trackers into your website or compromise user privacy.

Instead, you can easily export accurate conversion data from Matomo (either manually via a CSV file or automated with an HTTPS link) into your Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising or Yandex Ads for cross-validation. This way you can get an objective view of the performance of different campaigns and optimise your budget allocations accordingly.

Find out more about tracking ad campaigns with Matomo.

Matomo Tag Manager

The marketing technology landscape is close to crossing 10,000 different solutions. Cross-platform advertising trackers and all sorts of customer data management tools comprise the bulk of that growing stack.

Remember: Each new tool embed adds extra “weight” to your web page. More tracking scripts equal slower page loading speed — and more frustration for your users. Likewise, extra embeds often means dialling up the developer (which takes time). Or tinkering with the site code yourself (which can result in errors and still raise the need to call a developer).

With Tag Manager, you can easily generate tags for:

Custom analytics reports
Newsletter signups
Affiliates
Form submission tracking
Exit popups and surveys
Ads and more

With Matomo Tag Manager, you can monitor, update or delete everything from one convenient interface. Finally, you can programme custom triggers — conditions when the tag gets activated — and specify data points (variables) it should collect. The latter is a great choice for staying privacy-focused and excluding any sensitive user information from processing.

With our tag management system (TMS), no rogue tags will mess up your analytics or conversion tracking.

Session recordings

User experience (UX) plays a pivotal role in your conversion rates.

A five-year McKinsey study of 300 publicly listed companies found that companies with strong design practices have 32 percentage points higher revenue growth than their peers.

But what makes up a great website design and browsing experience? Veteran UX designers name seven qualities:

To figure out if your website meets all these criteria, you can use Session Recording — a tool for recording how users interact with your website.

By observing clicks, mouse moves, scrolls and form interactions you can determine problematic website design areas such as poor header navigation, subpar button placements or “boring” blocks of text.

Such observational studies are a huge part of the UX research process because they provide unbiased data on interaction. Or as Nielsen Norman Group puts it:

“The way to get user data boils down to the basic rules of usability:

Watch what people actually do.
Do not believe what people say they do.
Definitely don’t believe what people predict they may do in the future.”

Most user behaviour analytics tools sell such functionality for a fee. With Matomo Cloud, this feature is included in your subscription.

Heatmaps

While Session Replays provide qualitative insights, Heatmaps supply you with first-hand qualitative insights. Instead of individual user browsing sessions, you get consolidated data on where they click and how they scroll through your website.

Heatmaps are another favourite among UX designers and their CRO peers because you can:

Validate earlier design decisions around information architecture, page layout, button placements and so on.
Develop new design hypotheses based on stats and then translate them into website design improvements.
Identify distractive no-click elements that confuse users and remove them to improve conversions.
Locate problematic user interface (UI) areas on specific devices or operating systems and improve them for a seamless experience.

To get even more granular results, you can apply up to 100 Matomo segments to drill down on specific user groups, geographies or devices.

This way you can make data-based decisions for A/B testing, updating or redesigning your website pages.

Custom Alerts

When it comes to your website, you don’t want to miss anything big — be it your biggest sales day or a sudden nosedive in traffic.

That’s when Custom Alerts come in handy.

With a few clicks, you can set up email or text-based alerts about important website metrics. Once you hit that metric, Matomo will send a ping.

You can also set different types of Custom Alerts for your teams. For example, your website administrator can get alerted about critical technical performance issues such as a sudden spike in traffic. It can indicate a DDoS attack (in the worst case) — and timely resolution is crucial here. Or suggest that your website is going viral and you might need to provision extra computing resources to ensure optimal site performance.

Your sales team, in turn, can get alerted about new form submissions, so that they can quickly move on to lead scoring and subsequent follow-ups.

Use cases are plentiful with this feature.

Custom Dashboards and Reports

Did you know you can get a personalised view of the main Matomo dashboards?

By design, we made different website stats available as separate widgets. Hence, you can cherry-pick which stats get a prominent spot. Moreover, you can create and embed custom widgets into your Matomo dashboard to display third-party insights (e.g., POS data).

Set up custom dashboard views for different teams, business stakeholders or clients to keep them in the loop on relevant website metrics.

Custom Reports feature, in turn, lets you slice and dice your traffic analytics the way you please. You can combine up to three different data dimensions per report and then add any number of supported metrics to get a personalised analytics report.

For example, to zoom in on your website performance in a specific target market you can apply “location” (e.g., Germany) and “action type” (e.g., app downloads) dimensions and then get segmented data on metrics such as total visits, conversion rates, revenue and more.

Get to know even more ways to customise Matomo deployment.

Roll Up Report

Need to get aggregated traffic analytics from multiple web properties, but not ready to pay $150K per year for Google Analytics 360 for that?

We’ve got you with Roll-Up Reporting. You can get a 360-degree view into important KPIs like global revenue, conversion rates or form performance across multiple websites, online stores, mobile apps and even Intranet properties.

Setting up this feature takes minutes, but saves you hours on manually exporting and cross-mapping data from different web analytics tools.

Channel all those saved hours into more productive things like increasing your conversion rates or boosting user engagement.

Avoid Marketing Tool Sprawl with Matomo

With Matomo as your website analytics and conversion optimisation app, you don’t need to switch between different systems, interfaces or have multiple tracking codes embedded on your site.

And you don’t need to cultivate a disparate (and expensive!) MarTech tool stack — and then figure out if each of your tools is compliant with global privacy laws.

All the tools you need are conveniently housed under one roof.

Want to learn more about Matomo features? Check out product training videos next!

Your email address

Your website address

Your Analytics subdomain will be .matomo.cloud

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.

5 Homepage Design Examples & Best Practices to Inspire

Erin — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 14:56:28 +0000

Did you know it’s about 50:50 whether users stay on your website or leave without visiting another page?

With billions of websites and scrolling often done on the go, you have to make a strong first impression because the chances for a once-over are slim.

Get inspired from examples and learn how to design magnetically-appealing homepages from this guide.

5 effective homepage examples to inspire

Intercom

Intercom is an excellent example of a product-focused SaaS homepage. Let’s start at the top with the page’s crisp, clear copy. Even if you’ve never heard of Intercom, you know exactly what service they provide and how it helps your business.

It follows this up with two calls to action designed for buyers at different stages of the funnel – free trial (decision stage) or view demo (consideration).

Intercom follows up their messaging with interactive screenshots that show exactly how their product works — there are no vague cartoon graphics here!

Finally, case studies and social proof round off this homepage, giving the reader even more confidence to check out Intercom’s product.

Box

Box is another product-focused homepage that makes it easy for users to learn more about its growing service offering. The homepage leads off with a benefit-focused description of its service.

The flow of the website is second to none. If users scroll down from the main header, they are hit with several product features, detailed descriptions about how they benefit customers and calls to action that let readers learn more.

The use of trust signals is also excellent. The second thing users see when they land on the site are customer logos. These are followed up by multiple testimonial quotes further down the page.

Chewy

If you want an example of an excellent e-commerce home page that isn’t Amazon, look at Chewy.

The online pet store sells multiple products, but that doesn’t mean the site is hard to navigate. It’s incredibly easy to quickly find the category you want using the navigation menu at the top of the page or the many waypoints when you scroll down.

It also does a great job of describing exactly why you should shop with Chewy over competitors. Key selling points like free delivery, easy returns and 24/7 support are listed above the fold, meaning users can’t miss them.

Duolingo

Duolingo is a well-known language-learning tool whose homepage focuses on getting you to download the app. There are two big CTA buttons directly below the homepage’s header. One is to log in if you already have an account, and another, in green, to sign up if you don’t.

If you scroll instead, Duolingo has four benefit-focused subheadings that show exactly why you should learn a language using the app. The green “Get Started” CTA remains visible as you scroll, and there are two further CTAs at the bottom — one to go to the App Store, the other to visit Google Play.

Bench

Let’s end this roundup by looking at the homepage of a business offering a service rather than a product. Bench is an accounting and bookkeeping service provider whose website features a beautiful clean design, lots of trust signals and great CTAs.

The page starts with two uncommon CTAs — one to try Bench for free, the other to book a call with a sales rep. These make it easy for people interested in Bench to start the sales process.

If users choose to scroll instead, they are greeted with a social-proof-focused subheading showing that 25,000 American small business owners use Bench. Three testimonials from real users back this up.

If users still aren’t convinced, a series of CTAs and subheadings follow, inviting users to learn more about the platform.

What should a homepage design achieve?

There should be several goals you aim to achieve with your homepage’s design.

First, it should explain the purpose of your website and make it clear to first-time users who your company is and what you do. This is essential if you want them to carry on using your site for more than just a few seconds. A tagline or summary near the top of your homepage paired with relevant images is a great way to nail this.

Your homepage should also boost brand awareness and credibility. First impressions count, right? So, think about how much your website design says about your brand. A messy, poorly designed website doesn’t reflect your services. But a carefully crafted website can speak volumes.

That goes for the usability of your website, too. If your homepage is confusing or complicated, visitors probably won’t want to try purchasing it. But the better the user experience it offers, the less likely visitors will be to leave.

Part of improving the user experience is making it easy to navigate around the website. Your homepage design should include clear signposts for other pages, whether that’s product category pages on an e-commerce website or service pages on a B2B website.

Finally, your homepage has a role to play in conversion optimization. It might not pull the same weight as landing pages, but you can bet that customers will have second thoughts about purchasing if your website doesn’t look professional or secure. Relevant calls to action (CTAs) that encourage users to enter the top of your funnel should also be included. An email subscription banner is a great choice, for instance.

6 must-know website homepage design best practices

Behind every winning homepage design stands a detailed customer journey map.

A customer journey is a schematic representation of how site visitors will move around your website to accomplish various goals.

A good customer journey map lists different actions a user will take after landing on your website (e.g., browse product pages, save items to a wishlist, register an account, etc.) — and it does so for different audience segments.

Your homepage design should help users move from the first step on their journey (e.g., learning about your website) to the final one (e.g., converting to a paid customer). At the same time, your homepage should serve the needs of both new and returning visitors — prospects who may be at a different stage of their journey (e.g., consideration).

With the above in mind, let’s take a look at several website homepage design ideas and the reasons why they work.

1. Use familiar design elements

Whether you’re designing a new website or refreshing an old one, it’s always tempting to go “out of the box” — use horizontal scrolling, skip header navigation or include arty animations.

Bold design choices work for some brands, mainly those who aren’t using their website as a primary sales channel (e.g., luxury brands).

However, unfamiliar designs and layouts can cause issues. Research finds that 38% of users look at a page’s layout and navigation links when visiting a website for the first time, and 42% would leave a site because of poor functionality.

So why make the job harder for them? As UX consultant Peter Ramsey rightfully notes:

“…overly-stylised designs tend to be harder to use. And it’s okay to lean on what feels familiar, and works well.”

Therefore, analyse other homepage layout designs in your industry. Pay attention to the number and type of homepage screens and approaches to designing header/footer navigation.

Take some of those ideas as your “base.” Then, make your homepage design on-brand with unique typography, icons, visuals and other graphic design elements.

Take a cue from ICAM — a steel manufacturing company. Their niche isn’t typically exciting. Yet, their homepage design stops you and tinkers your curiosity to discover more (even if you aren’t shopping for metalware).

The interesting part is that ICAM uses a rather standard homepage layout. You have a hero image in the first screen, followed by a multi-column layout of their industry expertise and an overview of manufacturers.

But this homepage design feels fresh because the company uses plenty of white space, bold typography and vibrant visuals. Also, they delay the creative twist (horizontal scrolling area) to the bottom of the homepage, meaning that it’s less likely to intimidate less confident web users.

2. Decide on the optimal homepage layout

In web design, a homepage layout is your approach to visually organising different information on the screen.

Observant folks will notice that good homepage designs often have the same layout. For example, include a split-view “hero” screen with a call to action on the left and visuals (photo or video) on the left.

The reason for using similar layouts for website homepage design isn’t a lack of creativity. On the contrary, some layouts have become the “best practice” because they:

Offer a great user experience (UX) and don’t confuse first-time visitors
Feel familiar and create a pleasurable sense of deja-vu among users
Have proven to drive higher conversion rates through benchmarks and tests

Popular types of website homepage layouts:

Single column – a classic option of presenting main content in a single, vertical column. Good choice for blogs, personal websites and simple corporate sites.
Split screen layout divides the page in two equal areas with different information present. Works best for Ecommerce homepages (e.g., to separate different types of garments) or SaaS websites, offering two product types (e.g., a free personal product version and a business edition).
Asymmetrical layout assumes dividing your homepage into areas of different size and styles. Asymmetry helps create specific focal points for users to draw their attention to the most prominent information.
Grid of cards layout helps present a lot of information in a more digestible manner by breaking down bigger bulks of text into smaller cards — a graphic element, featuring an image and some texts. By tapping a card, users can then access extra content.
Boxes are visually similar to cards, but can be of varying shape. For example, you can have a bigger header-width box area, followed by four smaller boxes within it. Both of these website layouts work well for Ecommerce.
Featured image layout gives visuals (photos and videos) the most prominent placement on the homepage, with texts and other graphic design elements serving a secondary purpose.
F-pattern layout is based on the standard eye movement most people have when reading content on the website. Eye tracking studies found that we usually pay the most attention to information atop of the page (header area), then scan horizontally before dripping down to the next vertical line until we find content that captures our attention.

User behaviour analytics (UBA) tools are the best way to determine what type of layout will work for your homepage.

For example, you can use Matomo Heatmaps and Session Recording to observe how users navigate your homepage, which areas or links they click and what blockers they face during navigation.

Matomo can capture accurate behavioural insights because we track relative positions to elements within your websites. This approach allows us to provide accurate data for users with different browsers, operating systems, zoom-in levels and fonts.

The best part? You can collect behavioural data from up to 100 different user segments to understand how different audience cohorts engage with your product.

Try Matomo for Free

Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

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3. Include a one-sentence tagline

A tagline is a one-line summary of what your company does and what its unique sales proposition (USP) is. It should be short, catchy and distinguish you from competitors.

A modern homepage design practice is to include a call to action in the first screen. Why? Because you then instantly communicate or remind of your value proposition to every user — and provide them with an easy way to convert whenever they are ready to do business with you.

Here’s how three companies with a similar product, a project management app, differentiate themselves through homepage taglines.

Monday.com positions itself as an operating system (OS) for work.

Basecamp emphasises its product simplicity and openly says that they are different from other overly-complex software.

Asana, in turn, addresses a familiar user pain point (siloed communication) that it attempts to fix with its product.

Coming up with the perfect homepage tagline is a big task. You may have plenty of ideas, but little confidence in what version will stick.

The best approach? Interview your users or survey your ideal customers. Then run a series of A/B tests decide. You can test a roaster of homepage slogans on a rotating bi-weekly/monthly schedule and track how copy changes affect conversion rates.

With Matomo A/B test feature, you can create, track and manage all experiments straight from your web analytics app — and get consolidated reports on total page visitors and conversion rates per each tested variation.

Beyond slogans, you can also run A/B tests to validate submission form placements, button texts or the entire page layout.

For instance, you can benchmark how your new homepage design performs compared to the old version with a subset of users before making it publicly available.

Try Matomo for Free

Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

No credit card required

4. Highlight the main tasks for the user

Though casual browsing is a thing, most of us head to specific websites with a clear agenda — find information, compare prices, obtain services, etc.

Thus, your homepage should provide clear starting points for users’ main tasks (those you’ve also identified as conversion goals on your customer journey maps!).

These tasks can include:

Account registration
Product demo request
Newsletter sign-up

The best website homepage designs organically guide users through a set number of common tasks, one screen at a time.

Let’s analyse Sable homepage design. The company offers a no-fee bank account and a credit card product for soon-to-be US transplants. The main task a user has: Decide if they want to try Sable and hopefully open an account with them.

This mono-purpose page focuses on persuading a prospect that Sable is right for them.

The first screen hosts the main CTA with an animated drop-down arrow to keep scrolling. This is likely aimed at first-time visitors that just landed on the page from an online ad or social media post.

The second screen serves the main pitch — no-fee, no-hassle access to a US banking account that also helps you build your credit score.

The third screen encourages users to learn more about Sable Credit — the flagship product. For the sceptics, the fourth screen offers several more reasons to sign up for the credit product.

Then Sable moves on to pitching its second offering — a no-fee debit card with a cashback. Once again, the follow-up screen sweetens the deal by bringing up other perks (higher cashback for popular services like Amazon) and overcoming objections (no SSN required and multi-language support available).

The sequence ends with side-by-side product comparison and some extra social proof.

In Sable’s case, each homepage screen has a clear purpose and is designed to facilitate one specific user action — account opening.

For multi-product companies, the above strategy works great for designing individual landing pages.

5. Design proper navigation paths

All websites have two areas reserved for navigation:

Header menu
Footer menu

Designing an effective header menu is more important since it’s the primary tool visitors will use to discover other pages.

Your header menu can be:

Sticky — always visible as the person keeps scrolling.
Static — e.g., a hidden drop-down menu.

If you go for a static header and have a longer homepage layout (e.g., 5+ screens), you also need to add extra navigation elements somewhere mid-page. Or else users might not figure out where to go next and merely bounce off.

You can do this by:

Promoting other areas of your website (e.g., sub-category pages) by linking out to them
Adding a carousel of “recent posts”, “recommended reads” and “latest products”
Using buttons and CTAs to direct users towards specific actions (e.g., account registration) or assets (free eBook)

For instance, cosmetics brand Typology doesn’t have a sticky header on the homepage. Instead, they prompt discovery by promoting different product categories (best sellers, bundles, latest arrivals) and their free skin diagnostic quiz — a great engagement mechanism to retain first time users.

Once the user scrolls down to the bottom of the page, they should have an extra set of navigational options — aka footer links.

Again, this helps steer the visitor towards discovering more content without scrolling back up to the top of your homepage.

It also gives visitors a sense of consistency and helps them stay on a page they may otherwise close, says Simon Keating at Jetpack.

“Even site visitors who carefully read a page’s full content might reach the end of an article and close the page. To keep this from happening, you can offer a way for readers to discover more attractive content at the bottom of the page.”

Nielsen Norman Group says that people mostly use footers as:

A second chance to be convinced — after reading the entire homepage, the user is ready to give your product a go.
The last resort for hard-to-find content that’s not displayed in global header navigation (e.g., Terms and Conditions or shipping information pages).

As a rule of thumb, you should designate the following information to the footer:

Utility links (Contact page, Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, etc.)
Secondary-task links (e.g., Career page, Investor Details, Media contacts, etc.)
Brands within the organisation (if you operate several)
Customer engagement link (email newsletters and social media buttons)

The key is to keep the area compact — not more than one standard user screen resolution of 1280×720.

6. Show users what’s clickable (or not)

A homepage invites your site visitors on a journey. But if they don’t know which elements to click, they aren’t going to get anywhere.

Good homepage design makes it obvious which page elements are clickable, i.e., can take the user to a new page or another segment of the homepage.

Here are several must-know homepage design tips for better on-page navigation:

Use colour and underline or bold to highlight clickable words. Alternatively, you can change the browser cursor from a standard arrow into another element (e.g., a larger dot or a pointy finger) to indicate when the cursor hovers over a clickable website area.
Make descriptive button texts that imply what will happen when a user clicks the page. Instead of using abstract and generic button texts like “see more” or “learn more”, try a more vibrant language like “dive in” for clicking through to a spa page.
Use a unified hover area to show how different homepage design elements represent a single path or multiple navigation paths. When multiple items are encapsulated in one visual element (e.g., a box), users may be reluctant to click the image because they aren’t sure if it’s one large hit area leading to a single page or if there are multiple hit areas, leading to different pages.

Homepage of BEAUSiTE — a whimsical hotel in the Swiss Alps – embodies all of the above design principles. They change the cursor style whenever you scroll into a hit area, use emotive and creative micro-copy for all button texts and clearly distinguish between different homepage elements.

7. Optimise your homepage for mobile users

Did you know mobile accounted for 64.95% of all web traffic in September 2023? Yep, chances are most of your users are looking at your website’s homepage on a smartphone.

So, if you don’t have a separate mobile website or app, your homepage design better be optimised for mobile users. That means having a clear hierarchy, introducing mobile-focused design features like a new menu bar, and ensuring your CTAs are tappable and clickable.

It doesn’t just need to look great on a smartphone; your homepage should load quickly, too. Optimise your homepage for speed by minimising image file sizes and using a CDN to ensure content loads faster.

How to make your homepage design even more impactful?

Website homepage design is roughly 20% of pure design work and 80% of behind-the-scenes research.

To design a high-performing homepage you need to have data-backed answers to the following questions:

Who are your primary and secondary target audiences?
Which tasks (1 to 4) you’d want to help them solve through your homepage?

You can get the answers to both questions from your web analytics data by using audience segmentation and page transition (behaviour flow) reports in Matomo.

Based on these, you can determine common user journeys and tasks people look to accomplish when visiting your website. Next, you can collect even more data with UBA tools like heatmaps and user session recordings. Then translated the observed patterns into working homepage design ideas.

Improve your homepage design and conversion rates with Matomo. Start your free 21-day trial now!

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9 Ways to Customise Your Matomo Like a Pro

Erin — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 10:19:21 +0000

Matomo is a feature-rich web analytics platform. As such, it has many layers of depth — core features, extra plug-ins, custom dimensions, reports, extensions and integrations.

Most of the product elements you see can be personalised and customised to your needs with minimal restrictions. However, this breadth of choice can be overlooked by new users.

In this post, we explain how to get the most out of Matomo with custom reports, dashboards, dimensions and even app design.

How to customise your Matomo web analytics

To make major changes to Matomo (e.g., create custom dashboards or install new plugins), you’ll have to be a Matomo Super User (a.k.a. The Admin). Super Users can also grant administrator permissions to others so that more people could customise your Matomo deployment.

Most feature-related customisations (e.g. configuring a custom report, adding custom goal tracking, etc.) can be done by all users.

With the above in mind, here’s how you can tweak Matomo to better serve your website analytics needs:

1. Custom dashboards

Dashboards provide a panorama view of all the collected website statistics. We display different categories of stats and KPIs as separate widgets — a standalone module you can also customise.

On your dashboard, you can change the type, position and number of widgets on display. This is an easy way to create separate dashboard views for different projects, clients or team members. Rather than a one-size-fits-all dashboard, a custom dashboard designed for a specific role or business unit will increase data-driven decision-making and efficiency across the business.

You can create a new dashboard view in a few clicks. Then select a preferred layout — a split-page view or multi columns. Next, populate the new dashboard area with preferred widgets showing:

SEO website rankings
Visits, conversions and revenue
Custom reports

Or code a custom widget area to pull specific website stats or other reporting data you need. Once you are done, arrange everything with our drag-and-drop functionality.

Popular feature use cases

Personalised website statistics layout for convenient viewing
Simplified analytics dashboards for the line of business leaders/stakeholders
Project- or client-specific dashboards for easy report sharing

2. Custom reports

As the name implies, Custom Reports widget allows you to mesh any of the dimensions and metrics collected by Matomo into a custom website traffic analysis. Custom reports save users time by providing specific data needed in one view so there is no need to jump back and forth between multiple reports or toggle through a report to find data.

For each custom report, you can select up to three dimensions and then apply additional quantitative measurements (metrics) to drill down into the data.

For example, if you want to closely observe mobile conversion rates in one market, you can create the following custom report:

Dimensions: User Type (registered), Device type (mobile), Location (France)
Metrics: Visits, Conversion Rate, Revenue, Avg. Generation Time.

Custom Report widget is available within Matomo Cloud and as a plugin for Matomo On-Premise.

Popular feature use cases

Campaign-specific reporting to better understand the impact of different promo strategies
Advanced event tracking for conversion optimization
Market segmentation reports to analyse different audience cohorts

Read more about creating and analysing Custom Reports.

3. Custom widgets

We realise that our users have different degrees of analytics knowledge. Some love in-depth reporting dimensions and multi-row reporting tables. Others just want to see essential stats.

To delight both the pros and the novice users, we’ve created widgets — reporting sub-modules you can add, delete or rearrange in a few clicks. Essentially, a widget is a slice of a dashboard area you can populate with extra information.

You can add pre-made custom widgets to Matomo or develop your own widget to display custom reports or even external data (e.g., offline sales volume). At the same time, you can also embed Matomo widgets into other applications (e.g., a website CMS or corporate portal).

Popular feature use cases

Display main goals (e.g., new trial sign-ups) on the main dashboard for greater visibility
Highlight cost-per-conversion reporting by combining goals and conversion data to keep your budgets in check
Run omnichannel eCommerce analytics (with embedded offline sales data) to get a 360-degree view into your operations

4. Custom dimensions

Dimensions describe the characteristics of reported data. Think of them as “filters” — a means to organise website analytics data by a certain parameter such as “Browser”, “Country”, “Device Type”, “User Type” and many more.

Custom Dimensions come in handy for all sorts of segmentation reports. For example, comparing conversion rates between registered and guest users. Or tracking revenue by device type and location.

For convenience, we’ve grouped Custom Dimensions in two categories:

Visit dimensions. These associate metadata about a user with Visitor profiles — a summary of different knowledge you have about your audience. Reports for Visit scoped custom dimensions are available in the Visitors section of your dashboard.

Action dimensions. These segment users by specific actions tracked by Matomo such as pageviews, events completion, downloads, form clicks, etc. When configuring Custom Dimensions, you can select among pre-defined action types or code extra action dimensions. Action scoped custom dimensions are available in the Behaviours section of Matomo.

Depending on your Matomo version, you can apply 5 – 15 custom dimensions to reports.

Important: Since you can’t delete dimensions (only deactivate them), think about your use case first. Custom Dimensions each have their own dedicated reports page on your Matomo dashboard.

Segmenting reports by users’ screen resolution size to understand how your website performs on different devices
Monitor conversion rates for different page types to determine your best-performing assets

5. Custom scheduled reports

Manually sending reports can be time consuming, especially if you have multiple clients or provide reports to numerous stakeholders. Custom scheduled reports remove this manual process to improve efficiency and ensure timely distribution of data to relevant users.

Any report in Matomo (default or custom) can be shared with others by email as a PDF file, HTML content or as an attached CSV document.

You can customise which data you want to send to different people — your colleagues, upper management, clients or other company divisions. Then set up the frequency of email dispatches and Matomo will do the rest.

Auto-scheduling an email report is easy. Name your report, select a Segment (aka custom or standard report), pick time, file format and sender.

You can also share links to Matomo reports as text messages, if you are using ASPSMS or Clockwork SMS.

Popular feature use cases

Convenient stakeholder reporting on key website KPIs
Automated client updates to keep clients informed and reduce workload
Easy data downloads for doing custom analysis with business intelligence tools

Read more about email reporting features in Matomo.

6. Custom alerts

Custom Alerts is a Matomo plugin for keeping you updated on the most important analytics events. Unlike Custom Reports, which provide a complete or segmented analytics snapshot, alerts are better suited for tracking individual events. For example, significant traffic increases from a specific channel, new 404 pages or major goal achievement (e.g., hitting 1,000 sales in a week).

Custom Alerts are a convenient way to keep your finger on the pulse of your site so you can quickly remedy an issue or get updated on reaching a crucial KPI promptly. You can receive custom alerts via email or text message in a matter of minutes.

To avoid flooding your inbox with alerts, we recommend reserving Custom Alerts for a select few use cases (3 to 5) and schedule custom Email Reports to receive general web page analytics.

Monitor sudden drops in revenue to investigate the cause behind them and solve any issues promptly
Get notified of traffic spikes or sudden dips to better manage your website’s technical performance

Read more about creating and managing Custom Alerts.

7. Goals

Goals feature helps you better understand how your website performs on certain business objectives such as lead generation, online sales or content discovery. A goal is a quantifiable action you want to measure (e.g., a specific page visit, form submission or a file download).

When combined together, Goals make up your sales funnel — a series of specific actions you expect users to complete in order to convert.

Goals-setting and Funnel Analytics are a powerful, customisable combo for understanding how people navigate your website; what makes them take action or, on the contrary, lose interest and bounce off.

On Matomo, you can simultaneously track multiple goals, monitor multiple conversions per one visit (e.g., when one user requests two content downloads) and assign revenue targets to specific goals.

Separately, Matomo Cloud users also get access to a premium Funnels feature and Multi Channel Conversion Attribution. On-Premises Matomo users can get both as paid plugins via our Marketplace.

Tracking newsletter subscription to maximise subscriber growth
Conversion tracking for gated content (e.g., eBooks) to understand how each asset performs
Analysing the volume of job applications per post to better interpret your HR marketing performance

Read more about creating and managing Goals in Matomo.

8. Themes

Want to give your Matomo app a distinctive visual flair? Pick a new free theme for your On-Premises installation. Minimalistic, dark or classic — our community created six different looks that other Matomo users can download and install in a few clicks.

If you have some HTML/CSS/JS knowledge, you can also design your own Matomo theme. Since Matomo is an open-source project, we don’t restrict interface customisation and always welcome creativity from our users.

Read more about designing your own Matomo theme (developer documentation).

9. White labelling

Matomo is one of the few website analytics tools to support white labelling. White labelling means that you can distribute our product to others under your brand.

For example, as a web design agency, you can delight customers with pre-installed GDPR-friendly website analytics. Marketing services providers, in turn, can present their clients with embedded reporting widgets, robust funnel analytics and 100% unsampled data.

Apart from selecting a custom theme, you can also align Matomo with your brand by:

Customising product name
Using custom header/font colours
Change your tracking endpoint
Remove links to Matomo.org

To streamline Matomo customisation and set-up, we developed a White Label plug-in. It provides a convenient set of controls for changing your Matomo deployment and distributing access rights to other users or sharing embedded Matomo widgets).

Read more about white labelling Matomo.

Learning more about Matomo

Matomo has an ever-growing list of features, ranging from standard website tracking controls to unique conversion rate optimisation tools (heatmaps, media analytics, user cohorts and more).

To learn more about Matomo features you can check our free video web analytics training series where we cover the basics. For feature-specific tips, tricks and configurations, browse our video content or written guides.

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Measuring success for your SEO content

Jake Thornton — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 02:04:44 +0000

With over a billion searches every day in search engines, it’s hard to underestimate the importance of having your business present on page one (ideally in positions 1 – 3) ranking for the keywords that impact your sales and conversions.

"In 2019, Google received nearly 2.3 trillion searches and on page one alone, the first five organic results accounted for 67.60% of all the clicks."

Thanks for the 2019 SEO Stats, Jen Barrell at Impact.

So how is your business performing when it comes to ranking in the crucial top three spots of search for your most important keywords?

Accurately measuring the success of your content

Once you’ve done your keyword research, created compelling content, optimised it to be search-friendly, and hit ‘publish’, you then need to accurately measure the success of your efforts.

4 tips for measuring the success of your SEO content

1. Create a custom segment for "Visitors from Search Engines only"

By creating this custom segment, you’ll be able to analyse the behavioural patterns of the visitors who found your website through a search engine.

This way you can use many of Matomo’s powerful features (Visitors, Behaviour, Acquisition, Ecommerce, Goals etc.) focused entirely on search engine visitors only.

Once you’ve created this segment, you can begin to see key metrics like which entry pages are responsible for referring visitors to your website. For example: Visit Behaviour – Entry Pages, this is a great way to analyse your most effective SEO pages.You may be surprised at what pages currently bring in the most traffic.

As well as discovering which content resonates with your search audience, you will also be able to create more content focused on your targeted audience. Do this by learning which locations your search visitors are from, which device they use, what time of the day they visited your website and much more.

>> Learn more about creating custom segments

2. Website visits, time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate.

“The top four ranking factors are website visits, time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate.”

Jen Barrell at Impact.

These four metrics set the benchmark for your SEO success.

First, you need to get as many of the ‘right’ users to see your content. If you feel you’ve exhausted channels such as social media, email and possibly paid posts; think about who your ideal audience is. Where are they likely to hang out online? Are there community groups or forum sites that are interested in what you’re writing about?

Whatever the case, putting yourself out there and getting more traffic to your website will help show search engines that people are interested in your website. As a result, they’ll likely rank you higher for that.

When we say getting more of the ‘right’ users, we mean users who are generally interested in the topic/subject you’re writing about and interested in the work you do.

This is important for the next three metrics – increasing users time on your website, increasing the amount of pages your users explore on your website, and reducing the overall bounce rate for users who leave your website in a matter of seconds.

To evaluate these metrics, go to Behaviour – Pages in your Matomo and see how these metrics vary on previous posts or pages you’ve created. Which pages are already showing you the best results? Why do they get the results? Can you focus on creating more content like this?

Understanding what content is resonating with your users through these metrics is easy and is the starting point for measuring the success of your SEO content strategy.

>> Learn more about the Behaviour feature

3. Row Evolution

The Row Evolution feature embedded within the Search Engine Keywords Performance plugin lets you see how your ranking positions have changed over time for your important keywords. It also lets you see how the incoming traffic, related to your keywords, has changed over time.

This is valuable when measuring the changes you’ve made to your landing pages to see if it has a positive or negative effect on your ranking efforts.

This also lets you see how search engine algorithm changes affect your search rankings over time, and to see if the effects of these algorithm updates are temporary or long lasting.

Row evolution allows you to report on keyword performance with ease. If you only check your insights once a week or once a fortnight, you’ll see how ranking positions for your important keywords have changed daily (or even weekly, monthly or yearly however you prefer.)

>> Learn more about Row Evolution

4. What results are you getting from the lesser known search engines?

"In 2019 (to date), Google accounted for just over 75% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 9.97%, Baidu at 9.34%, and Yahoo at 2.77%."

Jen Barrell at Impact.

For most of us, we want to be ranking in the top three spots in Google Search because that’s where the majority of search users are. However, don’t shy away from opportunities you could be missing with lesser known search engines.

If you sell a product aimed at 55-65 year olds who use a PC computer, chances are they are using Bing. If you have customers in China the majority will be using Baidu, or in our case at Matomo, many of our loyal users use a privacy-friendly search engine like DuckDuckGo or Qwant.

Some of your ideal customers might be finding you through these alternative search engines, so be sure to measure the impact that these referrals may have on your conversions.

Strategically including important keywords that impact your business

While search is an important acquisition channel for most businesses, it’s also one of the most competitive.

We recommend analysing your keyword and content performance regularly and alter content that isn’t performing as well as you’d like. You need to continually learn from the content that is successful, and focus on creating more content like this.

The final thing to remember with search keyword performance is to be patient. If you have had little success in the past with attracting customers through search, it can take time to build this reputation with search engines.

4 ways to create more effective funnels

Jake Thornton — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 22:20:30 +0000

Accurately measuring the success of your customer’s journey on your website is vital to increasing conversions and having the best outcome for your business. When it comes to website analytics, the Funnels feature is the best place to start measuring each touch point in the customer journey. From here you’ll find out where you lose your visitors so you can make changes to your website and convert more in the future.

The funnels feature lets you measure the steps (actions, events and pages) your users go through to reach the desired outcomes you want them to achieve. This gives you valuable insights into the desired journey for your customers.

When creating a funnel with the funnels feature, you anticipate the customer journey that you want to measure, for example:

Step 1 – Visitor lands on your homepage and sees the promotion you’re offering.
Step 2 – They click the call-to-action (CTA) button which leads them to information on the product
Step 3 – They add the product to their cart
Step 4 – They fill in their personal information and credit card details
Step 5 – They click the “pay now” button

From here you can see exactly how many visitors you lose between each step. Then you can implement new techniques to decrease these drop-offs and evaluate the success of your changes over time.

But what about the non-conventional routes to conversion?

That’s right, visitors can end up in all different directions on your website. It’s important to use other features in Matomo to discover these popular pathways your visitors may be taking before the point of conversion.

Here are 4 Matomo features for discovering important alternative funnels on your website:

Transitions

The transitions feature lets you visualise mini funnels on selected pages. You can see how visitors landed on a specific page, and then where they moved on to from this specific page.

First you need to identify the page(s) that sells your product or service the most.

Whether it’s your homepage, a product page or an information page on your services. The transitions feature will then show you the before and after pathways visitors are already taking to get from page to page

The transitions feature is located under Behaviour – Pages. Find the important page you would like to analyse and click on the Transitions icon.

In the example above, you’ll see 18% of visitors who entered from internal pages came from the homepage, which you may have already suspected as the first step in your conversion funnel.

However, the exact same % of visitors are also entering through a blog post article called /best-of-the-best/

In this case, it highlights the importance of creating funnels with popular blog posts as the first step in the funnel. Your visitors may have found this post through social media, a search engine etc. Whatever the case, your blog posts could be your biggest influencer for conversions on your website.

>> Learn more about Transitions

Page Overlay

The overlay feature lets you see exactly where visitors are clicking on your landing pages which moves them either in the right or wrong direction in the conversion funnel.

If you see a high percentage of clicks to a page that’s off the beaten track from your desired conversion funnel, use the Funnels feature to follow this pathway and analyse how they get back to the pathway you initially intended them to take.

The best thing about the page overlay feature is the visualisation showing the results on the landing page itself. This gives you an idea of where they may be getting distracted by the wrong content.

You can locate the page overlay feature beside the transitions feature, shown in the screenshot below.

The page overlay feature also gives you a summary of the pageviews, clicks, bounce rates, exit rates and average time spent on page, so you can measure the overall success of each page in the display menu.

>> Learn more about Page Overlay

Users Flow

If you’re looking to see many of the most popular pathways your visitors are taking all at once, then Users Flow is a powerful feature which shows this visualisation.

Note: For Matomo On-Premise users, Users Flow is a premium feature. More information here.

The thicker the blue line between interactions means the more popular the pathway is.

Here you can see how visitors are navigating their way through your website before converting, this presenting clear steps in the conversion funnel that require monitoring and improving on to ensure your efforts are going into the right areas on your website.

>> Learn more about Users Flow

Row Evolution

Another important feature to use which is integrated within the funnels feature, is row evolution which shows you important changes in your user’s behaviour over time.

Having row evolution integrated within the funnels feature gives you a big advantage as it lets you measure the specific metrics and landing pages within your conversion funnel.

You’ll be able to see the increases and decreases in entries and exits to your landing page, as well as increases and decreases in the number of visitors who proceed to the next step in the funnel, and the conversion rate %.

You’ll also be able to add annotations so you can note all the changes you make to your landing pages over time and quickly identify how these changes impacted your conversion funnels.

>>Learn more about Row Evolution

Continually create more and more funnels!

Measuring the success of the desired pathway you want your customers to take is crucial to ensure you are presenting the best possible user experience for your visitors.

However, creating funnels for the less desired pathways is equally important. This way you’ll discover popular journeys your visitors are taking within your website you weren’t previously aware of, and can monitor them to make sure they still work in the future. You’ll be able to fix pain points easier and find faster ways to get visitors back on the right track to converting.

5 perfect feature combinations to use with Heatmaps and Session Recordings

Jake Thornton — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 03:37:00 +0000

Gaining valuable insights by simply creating a heatmap or setting up recordings on your most important web pages is a good start, but using the Heatmaps and Session Recordings features in combination with other Matomo features is where the real magic happens.

If you’re serious about significantly increasing conversions on your website to impact your bottom line, you need to accurately answer these questions:

Are you analysing the most important pages that influence conversions?
Are you segmenting heatmaps and recordings towards your most valuable visitors?
Are you using these features to create better customer journeys?
Have you identified current pain points for visitors before setting up heatmaps and recordings?
Are you learning what content resonates best for your audience?

With Matomo Analytics, you have the ability to integrate heatmaps and session recordings with all the features of a powerful web analytics platform, which means you get the complete picture of your visitor’s experience of your website.

Here are five features that work with Heatmaps and Session Recordings to maximise conversions:

1. Behaviour feature with Heatmaps

Before creating heatmaps on pages you think are most important to your website, first check out Behaviour – Pages. Here you get valuable information around unique pageviews, bounce rate, average time on page and exit rates for every page on your website.

Use this data as your starting point for heatmaps. Here you’ll identify current pain points for your visitors before using heatmaps to analyse their interactions on these pages.

Here’s how to use the behaviour feature to determine which pages to setup heatmaps on:

Make sure you know what pages are generating the most unique page views, it could be your blog rather than your homepage
Which pages have the highest bounce rates – can you make some quick changes above-the-fold and see if this makes a difference
When the average time on page is high, why are visitors so engaged with these pages? What keeps them reading? Setup a heatmap to learn more
Reduce exit rates by moving them along to other pages on your website
Determine some milestones you want to achieve e.g. use heatmaps as your visual guide to improve average time on page, bounce rates and exit rates. A milestone could be that the exit rate for your previous blog was 34%, work towards getting this down to 30%

2. Ecommerce feature and Custom Segments

If you run an ecommerce business, you may want to learn only about visitors who are more likely to be your customers. For example, if you find 65% of product sales come from customers based in New York, but visits to your product pages are from every state in the USA, how can you learn more specifically about visitors only from New York?

Using Segments to target a particular audience:

First, make sure you have created heatmaps and recordings on the popular product pages you want to learn about your visitor’s interactions
Note: Make sure the segment you create generates enough pageviews to apply a heatmap for more accurate results. We recommend a minimum of 1,000 page views per sample size.
Then create a custom Segment – search Ecommerce and find the Product Name and select the product. Learn how to do this here.

Click on ‘Add a new segment’ or on the ‘edit’ link next to an existing segment name to open the segment editor:

Click on any item on the left to see the list of information you can segment by. In this case search “City”, then select “Is” and in the third column search “New York” (example in the image above):

You can also use the search box at the bottom to search through the whole list.

This will give you insights across the Matomo platform based only on customers who purchased this product
Then go to the Ecommerce feature – and find Sales. Here you will learn what your most popular locations are for your product sales.

Once you know the location you want to segment, go back and update the custom Segment you just created. Click on the edit pencil icon and update it by selecting Add AND condition, and add the sub group you would like to track on the product page. In this example, select City – New York. Click Save & Apply.

Now you should have successfully created a segment for your popular product page with visitors only from New York.

Check out the heatmap or recordings you created for this page. You may be very surprised to see how this segment engaged with your website compared to all website visitors.

Note: If you run a lead generation website you can use the Goals feature instead of Ecommerce to track the success metrics you need.

3. Visitor Profiles within Session Recordings

Seeing visitor location, device, OS and browser for your recordings is very valuable, but it’s even more valuable to integrate visitor profiles with session recordings as you get to see everything that visitor has done on your website … ever!

What pages they visited before/after the recording, what actions they took, how long they spent on your website etc. All this is captured in the visitor profile of every individual session recording so you can see where exactly engaged viewers are in their journey with your business, for example:

How has this visitor behaved on your website in the past?
Is this visitor already a customer?
Is this the visitors first time to your website and
What other pages on your website are they interested in seeing in this session?

Use the visitor profiles feature within session recordings to understand the users better when watching each session.

You get the full picture of what role the page you recorded played in the overall experience of your website’s visitor. And more importantly, to see if they took the desired action you wanted them to take.

4. Funnels feature (premium feature)

The Funnels feature lets you see the customer journey from the first entry page through to the conversion page.

Once you create a funnel, you can see the % of visitors who drop off between pages on their way to converting.

In our example, you may then see page one to page two has a drop-off rate of 47%. Page two to page three 95% users drop-off rate and page three to page four 97.3% users drop-off rate.

Why is the drop-off rate so high from page two to page three and why is the drop-off rate so low from page three to page four?

So, you may need to simplify things on page one because you may unknowingly be offering your visitor an easy way out of the funnel. Maybe the visitor is stuck reading your content and not understanding the value of your offering.

Small tip for session recordings …

With session recordings especially you can see firsthand through live recordings where exactly visitors click away from the page which exits them from your conversion funnel. Take note to see if this is a recurring issue with other visitors, then take action into fixing this hole.

Whatever the case, work towards reducing drop-off rates through your conversion funnels by discovering where the problems exist, make changes and learn how these changes affect engagement through heatmaps and recordings.

5. A/B Testing feature (premium feature)

Following on from the example with the Funnels feature, once you identify there is a problem in your conversion funnel, how do you know what is preventing visitors from taking an action that pushes them to the next page in the funnel? You need to test different variations of content to see what works best for your visitors.

A/B Testing lets you test a variety of things, including:

different headlines
less copy vs more copy
different call-to-actions
different colour schemes
entirely different page layouts

Once you’ve created two or more variations of specific landing pages in the conversion funnel, see how visitors interacted differently between the variations of landing pages through your heatmaps and recordings.

You may see that your visitors have scrolled further down the page because more content was provided or an important CTA button was clicked more due to a colour change. Whatever the case, using A/B testing with heatmaps and session recordings is an effective combination for increasing user engagement.

The conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy

CRO is the process of learning what the most valuable content/aspect of your website is and how to best optimize this for your visitors to increase conversion chances.

Heatmaps and session recordings play a vital role in this strategy, but it’s how you work these features in tandem with other valuable Matomo features that will give you the most actionable insights you need to grow your business.

Want to learn how to create an effective CRO strategy?

Open letter to the European Parliament’s LIBE committee

Joselyn Khor — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 21:43:33 +0000

An open letter to the European Parliament's LIBE committee

In an effort to stem the tide of external control over user privacy, Matomo has rallied with other like-minded companies like Protonmail, NextCloud, Tutanota and Mailfence, to advocate for pro-privacy changes to the European Commission’s “e-evidence” proposal.

Excerpt from the letter:

“The Commission’s e-evidence proposal threatens the competitive advantage European tech businesses have over their American counterparts by undermining the protections we can provide to our customers. It breaks with the long-standing rule that only trusted national judicial authorities can order companies to hand over customer data for criminal investigations. Instead, the Commission’s e-evidence proposal would allow any foreign law enforcement agency from across the EU to force us to hand out customer data without our own authorities doublechecking the foreign order.

“Different from American Big Tech firms, European privacy tech companies lack the resources to verify the legality of each foreign order. Because of the way the e-evidence proposal is phrased, we would not even be able to properly authenticate foreign authorities to ensure that we are not replying to a malicious actor – let alone object to an order if we found it to be unwarranted.”

Matomo Founder, Matthieu Aubry emphasises, “It is time that privacy-minded tech companies work together to defend their users, their businesses, and the values they are founded on. This is why we are supporting Privacy Tech Europe.”

Read our open letter to members of the LIBE Committee in full.

Berlin website owners need consent for using Google Analytics

Joselyn Khor — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 23:34:06 +0000

Website owners in Berlin need consent for using Google Analytics

According to the Berlin Data Protection Office, if you’re a website owner collecting and sending data to third-party services (like Google Analytics) who are also using that data “for own purpose uses” in Berlin, you are now required to ask for specific consent from visitors in order to collect that information.

This means you can only use Google Analytics or similar services once you’ve gotten consent from visitors. In contrast, Matomo does not use information from Cloud or On-Premise users for “own purpose uses”. This means with a few configurations Matomo can be used without you needing to show a consent screen.

Consent is also needed when keystrokes or mouse movements are recorded. That means you need users to consent to your usage of features like Heatmaps and Session Recordings.

It’s advised that website owners in Berlin should check their websites for third-party content and tracking mechanisms. If you do use these third-party functions that require consent, you must either get consent or remove the functions. Consent is only effective if the visitor (whose data you’re collecting) is informed and agrees to their data being processed.

Currently this applies to website owners in Berlin, and should likely be applied for the whole of Germany to be on the safe side.