Piwik – Open Source Web Analytics
February 15th, 2010
2 comments
While testing out free and open source analytics platforms (and the open-source alternative to Google Analytics) we have now integrated Piwik – Open Source Web Analytics into DzineClub. The installation was fairly easy and the system is now integrated into the website. Just the website at this stage and not the blog.
We are also using Google Analytics but The reasons why we picked Piwik as well are
- Data Ownership
Piwik will give us more flexibility around the data gathered and exporting it. Also we can be rest assured that they don’t access or use the data. - Plugins and Extended Functionality
We want plugins and Extended functionality. We haven’t included anything on it yet but it’s just a matter of time - Real Time Tracking
We love the real-time tracking functionality that it provides. Although you can do some workarounds around Google, but its not real-time tracking. Knowing how the website is responding to a campaign within the first 5 minutes can sometimes be a key in success and failure of that campaign. - Hosted Locally
It is hosted locally, so it will not go down unless our server is down. Plus because of this we can be rest assured that if a provider decides to charge for a system down the track or discontinue it, we still have the upper hand.
Here are the first 5 minutes of impressions:
- The graphs are not as fancy as Google Analytics but very usable
- There is an amazing Adobe Air app that lets me track what is going across the site
- I like the plugins-report. It tells me if my users are using flash, silverlight, cookies, realplayer, quicktime, windowsmedia, java, gears, director and PDF plugins
We will be testing it thoroughly and updating the blog with what we find. Let us know if there is anything you are particularly interested in finding out.
