Piwik

Review: Piwik Analytics Software

1. Installation and Setup

There’s actually not much to say here, which is because installation was ridiculously easy. It is just necessary to download the zip to the sever (with wget) and unzipped it into the server root directory. This produces a directory called ‘piwik’ and a ‘How to Install Piwik.html’ file, which if you point your browser at it will redirect you to the installation instructions. The rest of the installation is fairly simple, following the instructions one can point the browser at the ‘/piwik/’ directory of the site and it will be greeted by the installer. Following this is really easy, you’ll need to create a MySQL database when prompted for the database info, but that’s about as hard as it gets. Towards the end you’ll be prompted to setup your site with Piwik which involves entering a few details about the site, then you’ll be provided with a snippet of JavaScript to add to your site template.

2. Site Integration

It is not necessary to copy and paste the JavaScript into the template, instead one can opt to install the WP-Piwik addon for WordPress. This makes the set up easy and also gives the widget on the WordPress admin dashboard which gives a nice overview of the site visits. As already mentioned, it was also possible to add a widget to the site to enable visitors to opt-out of tracking. This was also simple, just involving a copy and paste of a couple of lines of HTML from one of the settings pages into a WordPress page.

You can also integrate Piwik widgets with your site, by following the instructions in the documentation, this is a neat feature, especially if you have a custom start page set in your web browser.

You can also investigate the campaigns functionality in order to track entries to the site from the RSS feed. This is really simple to use, all you have to do is append the query string ‘?piwik_campaign=NAME’, where NAME is the name of your campaign to the end of a URL, to have it show up under that campaign. There you can integrate this with WordPress pretty well by adding the snippet.

 

3. User Interface

The Piwik user interface is really nice.  It’s pretty similar to the GA user interface, only cleaner and all the AJAX stuff makes it feel really responsive. There is a nice time tracking widget, which is something GA totally lacks. The only bad thing about the UI is the requirement of Flash for the graphs.

4. Extensibility

By extensibility, you can be primarily interested in API access. There’s certainly no shortage of this with two APIs listed on the documentation page. One API is for performing tracking, which you might not need, because of possible usage of the WordPress plugin. But you can focus on the analytics API, which allows you to access all the data through simple HTTP requests.

5. Overall Impresions

The impressions of Piwik as a project have been really good. The documentation is excellent and there seems to be a good community behind it. As a product its a pleasure to use, really easy to install and just works. The reliance on flash for the graphs is a bit disappointing, but perhaps this will change in the future as HTML5 matures.