I Have Just found about Piwik

(3 posts) (2 voices)

Started 2 years ago by Michael S.
Latest reply from Michael S.

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Piwik

Michael S.
Member

After searching for a web analytics software program solution for one of my blogs, I came across Piwik, and Open source web analytics software on piwik.org. This downlodable (GPL Licensed) software is one of the most popular installable wab analytics programs for tracking your website visitors in real time. One of the reason that Piwik became so popular, its because it was translated for more than 30 languages (Amharic, Bulgarian, Danish, German, English, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Portuguese, Thai and other languages). Not all the translation are 100% finished, but you can really get a grasp of the investment of the Open-Source community in this platform.

Of course the main title for this web analytics software, is that is enables any website owner to get real time web analytics reports. You can't really compare it to other real-time web analytics solutions, because it is not a Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) solution, but an installable software that you need to install it on your server. The best usage for this kind of software is for private companies who don't want their statistics data to be hosted on shared enviroments and they want their data to be store inside the organization.

Piwik has an intensive documented open APIs that allows you to publish the data in many formats. You can easily get the top 10 visited pages of your website of the current month by just querying the database for example. You can get the statistics data in XML, JSON, CSV, serialized PHP and simple HTML. Furthermore, Piwik's UI is vull customizable, and you can easily customize it using drag&drop widgets.

You can download and try it by downloading the Piwik software through their official website. The size of the software is 3.5MB and it is currently in version 0.5.5.

Posted 2 years ago #
Andrew Mandelson
Member

Piwik did a great job in penetrating a niche market, and this is probably the reason why it became so successful over the Internet. People love open source Web analytics, and a couple of reasons why using web analytics software is better than a software as a service solution. The most important aspect is privacy. When using a SaaS web a leading solution, the data is being stored on third party servers. Many companies want to maintain their visitors statistics data private on their servers. The second thing is that open source web only takes let's you expand its functionality and therefore create more modern and more customized Web analytics solutions that are dedicated for the companies in specific needs.

I've read many reviews about Piwik Web analytics software program, and most of them are very good. Many people decide that they are better using Piwik than Google analytics solution. Because it is an open source project, there is a large community of developers who contributions to Piwik open source community, by developing very interesting plug-ins that are both useful and innovative.

The statistics can be easily accessed using Piwik's API (Application Programming Interface). Furthermore, it has a fully customizable user interface, a draggable one. But if you compare Piwik against enterprise Web analytics solutions (SaaS), you can find the differences are in favor of the enterprise solutions. Whether you decide to use Piwik as an alternative to Google analytics web stats solution or deploy your own private web analytics solution using this open source, you first need to take advantage of the many advanced tools that even the basic Web analytics solution offers.

Posted 2 years ago #
Michael S.
Member

Man, the year 2010 will be "The Year of Web Analytics". So many solutions: BLVD Status, Woopra, MetriServe, metasun, ClickTale and many others. I am getting lost here guys. Just yesterday it was all about Google Analytics and GetClicky, today 10 companies emerging each month with brand new web analytics products that give you real-time statistics and heatmaps integration. ClickTale even give you Mouse move heatmaps, click hitmaps, attention heatmaps and scroll reach heatmaps! - Do you really think that any of those tools will multiply your website's conversion rates at the end of tracking, analyzing and testing every aspect of your website? - Any recommendation guys or any comparison site that really compares all those features? - I am confused and because I already use 3 web analytics solutions, I think that I will stay with my current web analytics gear.

Posted 2 years ago #

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