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Web Analytics Review


Piwik the Open Source Web Analytics

Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more...

Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to google Analytics and does offer almost the same features as well too.    Piwik is basically a PHP MySQL based program with Javascript support and the whole Packages resides in your own Web Server.   

What makes Piwik unique from the competition:

  1. Piwik’s features are built inside plugins: you can add new features and remove the ones you don’t need. If you are a developer, you can easily build your own plugins!
  2. you own your data: because Piwik is installed on your server, the data is stored in your own database and you can get all the statistics using open APIs (publishing the data in many formats: xml, json, php, csv)
  3. (NOW AVAILABLE!!!) the user interface is fully customizable: you can drag and drop the widgets you want to display and create a report especially tailored to you!
  4. You can download the complete history of updates from the http://builds.piwik.org/
  5. to avoid problems when updating from an Older version to the latest, I would suggest you try to download 0.2.9 then 0.2.10, then may be from here up wards
  6. Remove the config.ini.php file from the Piwik/config folder in Your Host Server so that when you run Piwik it would allow You to setup again and Piwik will fill the missing database tables during this process
Google Analytics

Google Analytics has been one of the most favorable options when it comes to performing web analysis and is one of the earliest to offer something like a FREE service to many web masters.   For those who are using only the FREE options, you are only allowed to track or monitor four(4) pages - legally that is as you will find yourself with only four(4) slots where you can have your most critical pages watched.

However; IF you insert the code that Google Analytic ask you too, in ALL of your pages ?    What will happen is that, you will still find other pages not listed in the four(4) slot to be present and being watched also and they will some-how appear under the Content Overview Performance section which is found in your lower right hand side.

As of this writing (February, 2009), I can still see those other pages that are outside of the high lighted four(4) i mentioned earlier, that Google Analytic is said to be watching closely.     Like, Piwik ... Javascript code is a must to make things work, which means in order to make things work for you using Google Analytic you also need to insert Javascript into your pages.

Don't worry about which version of Javascript you need as Google themselves is still using the conventional Javascript version so that it would work in all platforms as needed.