Use the Matomo dashboard

1. Find how many hits you get
2. Raw data: Visits Log examples
   
3. The do-anything super-flexible table: Custom Report
4. Why does Matomo data give different numbers than Google Analytics?
5. Quickstart: Add Matomo to your HTML like a newbie
6. Google hits vs Matomo hits
7. Popular topics at Matomo.org
8. Options for finding the location of your visitors
9. Spitballing a campaign URL
10. Collecting data when Site 1 and Site 2 are on the same domain

Use Matomo Tag Manager

1. Quickstart MTM:  just track your pageviews
2. Using Firefox DevTools to Troubleshoot MTM
3. Using the _paq.push() Javascript method in Matomo.

Fix Matomo Errors

1. Errors during core:archive
   
2. Beginner Guide to Troubleshooting Matomo
3. Behavior of a healthy web page in Matomo (coming soon)
4. The three most underrated Matomo guides
5. Specific Issue: Slow loading dashboard Issue: zero data for certain days: Remedy: core:invalidate/core:archive and cron
6. Specific Issue: Event fires in browser with no errors in devtools but nothing reaches the Matomo dashboard
   Remedy: enable debug logging on Matomo Tracking API
7. Specific Error: Memory Exhausted
   Remedy: Change PHP settings
8. Matomo slow or sluggish dashboard, how long does it take to run core:archive?
9. Errors with Matomo tokens and importing
10. Unable to write, Unable to create

Use Matomo w/o the dashboard

​

1. Hack the Reporting API
2. Hack the Tracking API
3. CLI: a list of Console commands
4. CLI: Examples of core:invalidate-report-data & core:archive
5. SQL Cookbook
6. Under the hood: Javascript
7. Javascript Experiment: In the browser console, manually set the User ID
8. Browser Devtools: Does Matomo use cookies?
9. Check on the PHP
10. In devtools, see the cookies Matomo uses 
11. Gallery of typical tracking requests, as seen in devtools.
12. Curl examples with POST for Matomo
    

Other

1. Import Matomo data into your favorite tools like Tableau, Apache Superset, Spark, et al
2. Move the entire Matomo db
3. How to track cookieless in Matomo
4. Upgrade Matomo without losing data (this is for sites with more than 1M hits/month)
5. How to use Matomo with Docker: a very short Matomo Docker Guide
6. Examples of sed and grep
7. Use log analytics
8. Does Matomo use cookies?
9. Printing the processes with PS
   

How Matomo browser tracking actually works, in six steps:

1. Good overview of How Matomo works: https://www.restack.io/docs/matomo-knowledge-what-is-matomo
2. Another good overview: https://developer.matomo.org/guides/how-piwik-works 
3. You deploy the Matomo stack on your computer or you start a Matomo Cloud instance.
4. When someone visits your website on phone or desktop, your HTML page loads, and a file called matomo.js loads into your visitor's browser, creating a _paq JS object,which stores properties and  methods
5. The JS listeners in the visitor's browser send some (dozens?) of reqs to your matomo.php endpoint, via HTTP, in the Tracking API whenever your visitor does something, starting with a pageview, If you use Matomo Cloud, this traffic goes from the visitor's browser to your private Cloud server in Frankfort Germany. If Matomo On Premise, this traffic goes from the visitor's browser to your own server in your hosting provider. Crucial feature of Matomo: it goes nowhere else. The data is immediately available as Visitors >> Visits log, and a few other places.
6. At your Matomo host, core:archive runs, enriching the raw data into human readable tables and reports, called aggregated data (report data)
7. You open a dashboard and see data
8. You send that data elsewhere:
   an email
   an alert
   a software like Power BI, etc
9. Official story of How does Matomo Work?
   (at matomo.org)
10. What is raw data?
    (at matomo.org)
11. What is the archiver?
    (official, see 1 or 2 )
12. New way to organize longerform single page documentation (emulate the Twitter docs)

---

Pictures of stones from Unsplash 
Thanks to:
Photo by K.Mitch Hodge
Photo by Andreas Brunn
Photo by Yana Druzhinina

This page is by Evan Genest a web dev in Madison Wisconsin