How to use Matomo in compliance with privacy laws
There are 4 ways to use Matomo in compliance with privacy laws
- With cookieless tracking and without a consent banner
- With cookieless tracking and WP Full Picture’s Consent Banner (recommended)
- With cookieless tracking and Matomo’s own Consent Banner
- Only with WP Full Picture’s Consent Banner
Let’s see what their advantages and disadvantages are.
With cookieless tracking and without a consent banner
When cookieless tracking is active, Matomo no longer uses tracking cookies to track visitors.
The advantages of this are obvious – no need for an annoying Consent Banner, your visitors will not have to agree to tracking (which many do not) and, as a result, you will track more people.
The downside is one – the accuracy of data collected by Matomo without cookies will be lower.
To enable cookieless tracking, simply enable the “privacy mode” in Matomo’s settings.
Cookieless tracking with WP FP’s consent banner (recommended)
This is the recommended way to use Matomo in privacy-compliant way. It gives you good data quality and highest amount of it. To use it, enable the “privacy mode” as described above and the Consent Banner module.
This way, you will track everyone in an anonymized way until they agree to tracking (requires the Consent Banner module) – then Matomo will track them normally.
With cookieless tracking and Matomo’s own consent banner
This method is similar to the above one, but uses Matomo’s own consent banner. You can turn it on in Matomo’s admin dashboard.
However, we do not recommend this method if you plan to use WP FP for integrating any other tracking tools than Matomo. This is because Matomo’s consent banner does not control tracking tools loaded by WP Full Picture. To do this, you need to install all of them using Matomo’s Tag Manager.
Only with WP Full Picture’s consent banner
If you want the highest quality data, then do not use “privacy mode”. Instead, just enable WP FP’s consent banner. It will load Matomo when people agree to tracking.