Google Data will differ from Matomo Data

Google Analytics will give different pageviews + visits versus Matomo Analytics.  You should worry both more and less than you do now. 

GA is great. Matomo is great. Coffee and tea are both great too.  But you should drink one at a time.

Why you should worry more than you do:
You might have set up something wrong in GA or in MA.  This can result in certain pages or events counting twice as much as you intend or counting not at all.  I work at Matomo and twice I remember a customer complaining that their hits in Matomo were exactly half of their hits in Google.  Guess what the solution was: we looked at their pages and saw that the Universal Analytics tag was firing twice. It had been going on for who knows how many months or years.

Why you should worry less than you do:
The data can come in accurately in both tools and you may be looking at differing definitions. Or something is disabled and you need to re-enable it.  A nice thing about Matomo Analytics is, it does a lot more things with the data than Google. And it is out in the open: you can see all the pieces and other people (smart people) can and that's called a community. 

Unique visitors:
If you have the Unique Visitor Metrics enabled for the Date Range period then Matomo will be accurately counting the total number of unique visitors for that period.

The only time that this metric would count visitors as one visitor each day is in the case where Cookies are disabled - in that case Matomo can only accurately track a unique visitor for up to 24 hours after which a new visitor ID will be generated for that visitor in the absence of cookies.

You can refer to this FAQ for enabling the Unique Visitor metric: https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/faq_113/



One down side of Matomo is it can do too much.  It's a little like driving a five speed car versus driving an automatic transmission car.  Matomo is the 5-speed.  Sometimes you want the transmission to just do its thing so you don't have to think about it.  


By the way, the car transmission analogy (see above) falls short in some ways though, since this is not a car, this is your data. It has value (like real monetary value) and you care about it (like your kids).  If Google were a bank, you would ask them what do you do with my money besides just hang on to it? Guess what: Google doesn't have to tell you. They sort of tell you but it's usually something like this (thank you Brave Browser):

And if Google Analytics were like your childcare provider, it's like if you left your kids with a mysterious baby sitter all day and every night when you pick them up, they are delivered exactly on time, to the letter of your agreement. But when you ask where were you while you were with the baby sitter, that is unknowable - a total secret, although people say they saw your kids out begging on streetcorners and sewing soccer balls chained to a machine.  Whereas Matomo is more like you drop your kids off at your sister's house: it's in your family and you can ask in great detail how they were handled.