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matomo-org / matomo

Empowering People Ethically with the leading open source alternative to Google Analytics that gives you full control over your data. Matomo lets you easily collect data from websites & apps and visualise this data and extract insights. Privacy is built-in. Liberating Web Analytics. Star us on Github? +1. And we love Pull Requests!
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Enhancement: Improve integration to Power BI by mapping IP and visitor ID columns properly from Matomo to Power BI #18945

Open atom-box opened 2 years ago

atom-box commented 2 years ago

Currently when transferring data from Matomo to Power BI the Ip and Visitor ID columns cannot be read.

User reports: Connecting to the DB from Power BI is not ultra smooth (IP and visitor ID columns cannot be read in Power BI).

sgiehl commented 2 years ago

@atom-box Those values are stored as BINARY values in the database. We won't change that in the future I guess. I'm not sure if Power BI has a possibility to show BINARY values decoded somehow.

@peterbo Do you know if that is possible somehow?

atom-box commented 2 years ago

On that exact track the user wrote back, adding: "The issue is on the Power BI side, as this tool cannot read binary. Yet, given than Power BI is more widespread than Matomo, I would expect Matomo to work around Power BI, not vice versa. Matomo needs to be 100% business-ready in order to convince decision makers that it is worth dumping GA for."

peterbo commented 2 years ago

@atom-box ideally, you should use the web connector to connect to the API, e.g. https://example.com/index.php?module=API&method=Live.getLastVisitsDetails&idSite=1&period=day&date=yesterday&format=JSON&token_auth=XYZ, or whatever method fits best. This delivers IP addresses (anonymized of course) and all other binary columns in text format.

For the MariaDB / MySQL connector, I'm not aware of any option to transform Binary fields to text on load (but I'm not an expert, so there could possible be an option!)

atom-box commented 2 years ago

A user wrote today:

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I work for startups and mid-sized companies in matters of web analytics, tracking and data visualization. Also being Germany based I am currently facing the following issues when pitching matomo to them:

The Google Analytics environments they know and want are on the decline due to data privacy situation in Europe an especially in Germany. Therefore, I pitch / recommend the switch to a self-hosted Matomo instance. However, the matomo web interface is currently not up to their standards. Executives as well as marketers struggle to find the reports they are used to.

From my perspective this would not be an issue if they or I were able to rebuild the most important reports in their self-service BI environment which is Power BI or Tableau most of the time. This is where Matomo struggles in terms of connectors for these data visualization tools since marketers do not want custom scripts querying some databases rather than a standard connector to combine metrics and dimensions via drag and drop.

I am convinced that Matomo has a great potential as a data collection interface in the highly regulated German market and in combination with tableau and Power Bi could even serve enterprise requirements. However Matomo needs to integrate better (or more user-friendly) with standard self service BI environments and the non-technical staff using it.

Furthermore, most of the infrastructures I maintain are currently shifting towards server side tag management (to mitigate effects of GDPR, iOS script blocking). I am currently unaware of the Matomo efforts in this field.

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