Theoretically. Practically almost all websites need third party cookies to use any decent analytics platform (most often GA). So the end result is still that 100% of websites need cookie consent.
Matomo is great and it's nice that it's open source. One advantage of userTrack, which is also self-hosted, is that you get heatmaps and session recordings at no extra cost, which on Matomo cost from 200eur/year.
No website needs GA. You choose to have it for whatever reason but there's not ever a need to use GA. There are many less intrusive ways to father statistics than to sell your users to Google.
There is definitely a need for online analytics. Analytics are as important to me as crash reports.
* It helps me focus on the content my users need the most, and see what triggers donations.
* It helps me catch and diagnose traffic dips, and react to them.
* It helps me catch and diagnose unexpected issues. For instance, caching changes broke a component that accounts for 30% of my revenue. It would have stayed broken for a whole month if I didn't see the dip in events.
I will replace Google Analytics soon, but even as a tech-savvy person, it's a dreadful task. Google Analytics is free, simple, and incredibly reliable. Setting up your own self-hosted alternative, or paying a monthly fee for an alternative is a lot less desirable.
Yes I absolutely agree it can be useful.anf satisfying to see analytics. But it also means you send your users' data to another place where you know it will be recycled etc.
There are alternatives but as you say sadly none are as easy - probably because none have as much budget behind them. I see a number of comparison articles for gdpr compliant analytics, so it seems to have become its own market of sorts.
I have opted myself out of most Google services due to the intrusive nature, I wouldn't want to impose it on my site visitors (but I also have no need to monetize, so maybe a different ballpark).
If you want people to do the right thing, it has to be easy, or it has to pay off. GDPR is incredibly hard, and it's costly.
Just knowing what I need to do requires me to wear my lawyer hat. Actually doing it requires me to wear my developer hat, or to pay other people a monthly fee.
I will eventually move to another solution, but it has an infinitely lower impact on my users than the problems I help them solve.
I will switch this because I swore to do the right thing [1], and because I have a lot of time on my hands. I can't reasonably expect amateur bloggers to do the same. It's an unreasonable burden on people who don't run a website for a living.
Well, maybe legislation like GDPR will incentivize Google to build a less intrusive analytics suite. Or force the industry to innovate to create a new form of analytics.
Selling user behavior data to google in exchange for free analytic is exactly one of those markets which GDPR want to turn from being invisible for the persons whose behavior data get sold to visible.
If a hospital would in secret sell my medical records to drug companies in order to get free medical supplies I would object on several grounds. First because they are doing it without telling me. Second because its not their data to sell. Third because it create an unfair market where drug companies who are more ethical get out competed.
This is exactly the spirit of the GDPR. You know your data won't turn up in some completely unrelated place because of a previous business transaction.
