I also like the interface. Took a while to get used to it but after that, I liked it even better than Google Analytics.
But one problem that seems unsurmountable is that it tries to be clever. And while trying, it messes up your data.
If you have pages with a parameter in the querystring that is called "q", Matomo does not count those as pageviews. It tries to be clever and only count those as "searches". Probably because many site searches use a parameter "q" for what the user is searching for.
Even if a page is a search result page, it should be counted as a pageview.
The problem gets even worse when you have users bookmarking pages with a "q" parameter. Then things get really messy when you try to understand which pages users use, where they come from etc.
I have searched a lot, but have found no way to disable this "cleverness". And no way to retroactively fix the data.
Record tracking pings independently of any solution and figure things out later, a 1x1 GIF can absorb an unlimited number of query strings, and S3 storage for log files is extremely economical. It doesn't matter which analytics solution you end up with, you'll always be throwing away data. IIRC even GA enterprise doesn't allowing pulling the original click log back out of it, only some form of sampling or another. Put a 1x1 GIF in an S3 bucket, create a CloudFront distribution and enable logging for it into another bucket. Tada, unlimited scale achieved for pennies.
Matomo and GA's trackers both allow sending the query to a URL of your choice. Treat the analytics system as an index over the logs, rather than treating the logs as an auxiliary artefact of the analytics system
That's an odd choice as WordPress, which is by far the most popular CMS, uses ?s= as a search query.
I would expect those pages to be included in the data. They could offer some sort of segmentation if they think they they can separate out searches, though.
Self hosting is easy. That's a plus.
I also like the interface. Took a while to get used to it but after that, I liked it even better than Google Analytics.
But one problem that seems unsurmountable is that it tries to be clever. And while trying, it messes up your data.
If you have pages with a parameter in the querystring that is called "q", Matomo does not count those as pageviews. It tries to be clever and only count those as "searches". Probably because many site searches use a parameter "q" for what the user is searching for.
Even if a page is a search result page, it should be counted as a pageview.
The problem gets even worse when you have users bookmarking pages with a "q" parameter. Then things get really messy when you try to understand which pages users use, where they come from etc.
I have searched a lot, but have found no way to disable this "cleverness". And no way to retroactively fix the data.