Analytics and Privacy: Using Matomo in EBSCO's Discovery Service

When selecting a web analytics tool, academic libraries have traditionally turned to Google Analytics for data collection to gain insights into the usage of their web properties. As the valuable field of data analytics continues to grow, concerns about user privacy rise as well, especially when discussing a technology giant like Google. In this article, the authors explore the feasibility of using Matomo, a free and open-source software application, for web analytics in their library's discovery layer. Matomo is a web analytics platform designed around user-privacy assurances. This article details the installation process, makes comparisons between Matomo and Google Analytics, and describes how an open-source analytics platform works within a library-specific application, EBSCO's Discovery Service.
INTRODUCTION In their 2016 article from The Serials Librarian, Adam Chandler and Melissa Wallace summarized concerns with Google Analytics (GA) by reinforcing how 'reader privacy is one of the core [...]