Google Analytics Alternative With Real Time Visitor Tracking: Piwik

Visitors statistic is a crucial information for webmasters. I’m sure almost all webmaster know about Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free service by Google that provides you with detailed statistics about visitors of a website. Google Analytics is being used widely by webmasters and it is one of the most popular visitor tracking service. If you somehow don’t like to use Google Analytics and you are looking for its alternative, you can use Piwik.

What is Piwik? Piwik is a web analytics software written in PHP. If you have your own web space and your server has a minimum PHP 5.1.3 and MySQL 4.1, you can install and use Piwik. Piwik can provides you with a detailed real time reports about your website visitors. Piwik is written by the developers of phpMyVisites after the last stable release of phpMyVisites 2.3. Some features of Piwik according to the developers:

1. Piwik’s features are based on plugins so you can easily add new features or remove the ones that you don’t need. You can build your own plugins too.

 

 

2. The statistics data is owned by you because Piwik is installed on your server. The data can be accessed using Piwik’s open APIs.

 

3. The interface of Piwik is fully customizable. The Piwik’s dashboard contains widgets and you can drag and drop the widgets that you want to display.

 

 

4. Piwik generates real time web analytics reports.

Piwik Dashboard

The installation of Piwik includes these plugins:

• API – Allows you to access Piwik’s analytics data using Piwik APIs.

 

 

• Actions – Track and reports about page views, outlinks and downloads.

 

• DBStats – Reports the database usage by Piwik.

 

 

• Dashboard – Piwik’s main dashboard.

 

• Feedback – Send your feedback to Piwik developers.

 

 

• Goals – Create goals and see reports about your goal conversions such as evolution over time, revenue per visit, conversions per referer, per keyword, etc..

 

• Installation – Piwik installer.

 

 

• LanguagesManager – Let users display Piwik interface in different languages.

 

• Live – Let you see live visitors, like Woopra.

 

 

• Login – Login authentication plugin.

 

• Provider – Track and reports about visitors’ internet provider.

 

 

• Referers – Reports referrers data such as search engine, keywords, websites, campaign tracking, direct entry, etc..

 

• SitesManager – Let you manage the websites that you want to track using Piwik.

 

 

• UserCountry – Reports the visitors’ country

 

• UserSettings – Track and reports visitors’ settings such as browser, operating systems, screen resolution, etc..

 

 

• UsersManager – Let you add, edit and change permissions of your Piwik’s users.

 

• VisitFrequency – Reports various statistics about the returning visitor versus the first time visitor.

 

 

• VisitTime – Reports the local and server time. Server time information can be useful to schedule a maintenance on the website.

 

• VisitorInterest – Reports about the visitor interest such as number of pages viewed, time spent on the website.

 

 

• VisitsSummary – Reports the general analytics numbers: visits, unique visitors, number of actions, bounce rate, etc..

 

• Widgetize – This plugin makes it very easy to export any Piwik Widget in your Blog, Website or on Igoogle and Netvibes!

After you install Piwik, you will be given the javascript tracking code to be included on the website that you want to track. You can track virtually unlimited websites with a single installation of Piwik, or course this depends on your server’s power and specifications. Piwik allows you to enable or disable anonymous access to your Piwik analytics data. You can also add users to your Piwik installation. You can set these user to have a viewing access to your Piwik analytics data, or set him/her as a co-admin.

In my test, it seems that Piwik missed to track some visitors compared with Google Analytics. I can’t confirm if this is a problem of my Piwik installation or not, maybe some of the visitors blocked the Piwik’s tracking code. As for Piwik’s database usage, tracking a website with 1000 unique visitors per day will cause Piwik’s database to grow around 8MB a month. This will be quite a problem is you are tracking websites with lots of visitors on a shared host with limited space. While Piwik can be the alternative to Google Analytics, you won’t have the Google AdWords and Adsense integration in Piwik.

Piwik is still quite new (1 year and 9 months since the first public alpha release) and has a lot of room to grow. The plugins database is still small and we can expect to see it grows as more developers contribute to Piwik’s development. Piwik was choosen as the Sourceforge Project of the Month for July 2009. Before you use Piwik, you can try the online demo.

[Piwik]

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Tags: Analytics, MySQL, Open Source, PHP, Piwik