Site Statistics with Piwik

Nowadays, many sites rely on Google Analytics to measure traffic, but what is the hard thing is to check that information. The Piwik claims to be an open-source alternative to Google Analytics, but are you up to it? Although not completely replace Google Analytics, it is sufficiently mature and complete for many users.

The Piwik is the successor of phpMyVisites. It lacks some features present in phpMyVisites, the export to PDF and emailing reports, but it offers a plugin architecture, an improved API, User Interface less pollution and greater performance and expandability.

We looked at Piwik 0.5.4, which is the latest stable version. Who is already used to install web applications will find it easy to install Piwik. To use it, you need MySQL 4.1 or later, PHP 5.1.3 or later, the extensions pdo and pdo_mysql PHP and GD for the extension of PHP, if you want to have graphics "sparklines." Part of the installation process is a verification system that displays the system requirements and indicates whether you are missing something. In the test server, running WordPress, the extension GD was the only thing that was not already installed. If all requirements are met, simply navigate to the URL of the installation of Piwik, give some information and click "Next" a few times. The installation should take between five and ten minutes.

What is a little more difficult is to integrate Piwik web. For this, you must include a JavaScript code on every page to be counted in the statistics. Some content management systems and popular software for creating blogs have plugins that work with Piwik, so it is necessary to insert the code in your templates manually. We use the plugin Piwik Analytics to integrate it into WordPress. After the Piwik is installed and configured, the results can be viewed almost immediately.

As Piwik depends on JavaScript to track visitors, he will lose a certain amount of traffic, depending on the amount of people accessing the site with JavaScript turned off. He does not track visitors to obtain information through RSS / Atom feeds, and also lets go to download some files. The Piwik tracks clicks on certain URLs that end with recognized file types,but if someone clicks on a link, say, a PDF hosted on the site without visiting a page with the script trace Piwik before, this access is not registered .

The Piwik interface is easy to use and offers lots of flexibility. Users can customize the main panel, adding various widgets that track the actions of visitors (such as what links were clicked), the sites of origin of visitors and visitors' settings (resolution, browser, etc.). The widgets themselves can display data as bar graphs, sparklines or pizza, or simply as numbers. Data can be exported by each widget as a graphic image, such as CSV, JSON and PHP.

Some users do not like Google Analytics because it relies heavily on Flash. The good news is that Piwik is much less use of Flash than Google Analytics, and many of the widgets display data in tables that do not. But if you prefer pretty graphics, you will need Flash.

Although the Piwik has the advantage of putting the site owners in control of their data, it has the disadvantage of imposing an additional load on the server. For sites with little traffic, this should not be a problem. The test system when we experience the Piwik had no problems with this additional load, but it is a site with less than a thousand hits a day (at least according to Piwik). It is worth noting that the Piwik not have to run on the same server sites crawled.

Compare the Piwik directly to Google Analytics is like comparing apples and oranges. Both tools offer a good size traffic websites, and usually the numbers that have hit both - although Google seems to register six or seven percent fewer visits than the Piwik. By default, the Piwik not (yet) have access option to discard the administrators, but the plugin for WordPress offers this option - so it is not clear to which portion of traffic that Google loses cash or in relation to Piwik .The two scanners show the visitors a browser, region, operating system, resolution and more.

Although the Piwik offers webmasters control over their data, visitors may not much like to know the amount of data that they collect about Piwik. The report of the visitor log displays the IP of the visitor, the keywords that brought them to the site, date and time of visit, the source URL, the duration of the visit, the operating system, browser, resolution of screen and the browser plugins that were detected.

The Piwik does a respectable job in identifying the keywords that lead visitors to the site and indicate the most popular pages, repeat visitors, time spent on the site and so on. For amateur webmasters who just want to see how fares the performance of their sites, the Piwik offers all the tools they may want. Depending on the needs of its business, the Piwik should be suitable for webmasters who need an overview of traffic and site performance. But for users with the performance of the site as one of his most important professional goals, it may not be enough.

No doubt, Google is much better at displaying spatial data. Users who have the curiosity to know the exact location of the traffic will prefer to use Google Analytics. With it, you can reach the city of origin in some cases. Since the Piwik, in turn, shows visitors by country and provider, and only. Who wants to know if the traffic originates from the Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, New York or Los Angeles, will have to use Google Analytics, try one of the plugins made by third parties and that require a good deal of configuration or create your own plugin.

A complete list of plugins on the page developers Piwik, although the list is a mere pursuit of Trac. Can you find some interesting plugins, but you have to look good.

Google Analytics also has more resources for webmasters who want to improve traffic and compare it to other sites. For example, the User agrees to the sharing of data, Google will compare site traffic data collected from other sites that also share their data. Of course, Google already has this data, but the appeal gives him permission to aggregate them. This allows the webmaster to compare the performance of your site to other sites in its category, for example. We can compare the traffic of our test site to other sites covered by the open source Google Analytics.

While Google has the resources Piwik does not (and vice versa), Google Analytics does not favor either the schema of "do it yourself. The Piwik has a plugin architecture that allows developers to include their own resources. Most features of Piwik is enabled through plugins. But the interface of the plugins does not help the User to obtain information. Each plugin has listed a brief description, the version number and links to enable or disable the plugin, but in most cases there are no links for more information about it. The plugin "Live Visitors!", For example, has as description only "Live Visitors!".

According to the schedule of Piwik, version 1.0 should come out around 2010. Among the features planned for version 1.0 are the ability to make anonymous IPs stored in the database Piwik, export widgets to display limited data instead of all site data and improvements in performance and documentation.

But it is also important to know that will not be included in Piwik. The schedule tells you that the team does not intend to offer "advanced analysis found in other commercial products: generating custom reports, custom segments and segmentation in real time, funnel analysis, advanced reporting, e-commerce and related services". Instead, they suggest that all these features will be added as plugins, and say the aim of Piwik is to create an "open framework of web analytics" that can be used to implement these features, if that is the design community .

For a more complete experience, you may want to combine a package Piwik as AWstats that analyzes Apache logs. If you are not concerned about the privacy of the data or make a point of using a free tool, Google Analytics might be a better option for now, because it offers a wider selection of resources. But users who seek an open source solution, and do not want to give your data to Google or anyone else, should take a good look at Piwik. There is no problem in using the two tools together in one site, so you'll have all the information you want.