Piwik – open source web analytics with plugins & API
Piwik - Open source web analytics
Recently I was looking for alternatives to Google Analytics, just cause. Google does a great job at providing a vast amount of information about your visitors, sometimes it’s just nice to see what’s on the other side.
I stumbled across Piwik, an open source web analytics program. Piwik is a self-hosted solution which gives you full control over the system and you get to keep all of your data private. In case you forgot, google uses the information it aggregates from tracking your site to help itself in other areas. This is also great if your site is a walled garden and you want to keep google out for privacy reasons.
From Piwik’s site:
Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed real time reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more.
The way that you track visitors is with a snippet of javascript, the same way as google analytics. Piwik does have to run on a server that supports PHP and MySQL. Install is just as easy as installing Wordpress, just need a database ready for it to setup.
The really awesome thing about Piwik is all of the functionality is built with plugins and it’s open source and it sits on your own server. What does that mean? You can build that functionality into your web analytics application that you always wanted but some of the other providers fail to provide.
Some of the cool plugins:
- Click heatmap
- LiveOverView
- Average page number in search engines
Oh, I forgot to mention that you also get an API that you can interact with and basically do anything within the system and extract data in multiple formats(csv, xml, json)
