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?
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.
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.
You do need to explicitly enable this in the GA dashboard, and ask users' consent under the GDPR.
[1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2580383?hl=en [2] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2497941?hl=en
That data is mostly garbage and only getting worse.
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.
Something you can't do when leaving google land.