Email allows you to create a relationship with your customers that looks and feels more personal. While phpList offers deep insights on how your email campaigns perform, most marketers are equally interested in knowing what happens after the click?!
Marketing now is not only data-based but it’s data-driven and this makes data ownership a big chapter in the digital transformation era novel.
phpList users do not fit the usual marketer’s profile. We are not keen to feed our data in 10 different systems and we assume (or even encourage) the same for our readers. While the search for more ethical solutions is a never-ending journey, raised concern and awareness from all kind of organizations collecting different types of data is a big incentive for companies to start using open source tools.
phpList and Matomo
If you ever checked the phpList forums you have probably come along some Piwik/Matomo integration discussion.
The community spoke and the community answered 😉 Our long term community contributor and developer of many of phpList plugins: Duncan Cameroon implemented the integration made available in phpList 3.5.3.
Starting from version 3.5.3, you can choose to enable Matomo before queuing your campaign for sending. As stated on the Release Notes: “You can choose between Matomo or Google Analytics in the Settings page of your account. Similarly to the current GA parameters, when selected, each URL will have four additional query parameters that will be displayed and can be edited on the Finish tab when composing a campaign. The data is not collected, stored, or viewed in phpList.”
Similar to phpList’s philosophy, with Matomo you have 100% ownership of any data that you collect and you are solely responsible for how you manage and process them. You can still isolate the effect of your email readers, their preferences and behaviors without having to share that with any third-party.
If you are new to Matomo (or phpList) You can have a look at the phpList and Matomo tutorial videos prepared by FLOSS Marketing School.
According to the Matomo’s official website this tool “is used on more than one million websites in 200 countries” and it is commonly known that it is the most popular open source web analytics software.
Manual still missing Matomo documentation
Would you like to be the next to contribute on this?
If you have used Matomo in the past and you can provide some useful tips by helping enrich the phpList manual with more info. You will be able to edit the manual and wiki with further information on the Matomo integration with phpList.