Proposal to switch to a privacy-respecting web analytics tool

Problem statement

Currently we're using Google Analytics which for many reasons is not a particularly privacy-friendly tool to be monitoring our web traffic with. I propose we move to something which enables us to control our data capture and sharing more closely and have ownership of our data. There are open source alternatives which have feature parity.

Detailed proposal

We have been using Google Analytics since our websites were developed as the default tool because it's easy and available, however it's not privacy friendly and increasingly we should be focusing on practicing what we preach, and moving towards a more digitally sovereign architecture.

At this time we don't have an infrastructure team, so I suggest we look for a SaaS provider who is providing a sovereign solution of something like Matomo.

Friendly - a long established Mautic Member and supporter of the project - has offered to host a Friendly Analytics instance (Matomo) free of charge for Mautic, which I feel would be a good first step for us.

Benefits / impact

We can have more control over the data we collect and how it's stored and shared, and we're also going to be using an open source project which I feel is important for us to exemplify what's possible with an open source tech stack.

Potential challenges

We will need to shift our web properties over to using Friendly Analytics.

Wordpress - https://matomo.org/installing-matomo-for-wordpress/ has an integration options

Discourse - https://meta.discourse.org/t/matomo-analytics/33090 - theme component

Read the Docs - add to the theme template

PHPKB - Waiting on response but likely we can add to the theme template

We will also need to switch from Google Tag Manager to the Friendly-provided alternative.

Resources needed

The web team will need to verify that all event tracking is documented and working in the new system. We'll also need to replace the Google Analytics and Tag Manager with the alternatives, and ensure that all triggers, tags and events are working as expected.

Suggested timeline

Ideally I'd like us to switch away from Google Analytics by the end of Q3 2025.