Piwik - Open source web analytics software

Posted on April 27, 2008 at 5:29 am

Looking for free web analytics software? Website owners realize how important their visitors are. If you don’t have anyone going to your site on a daily basis, then there’s no point in having one. Some websites are created to express the admiration of a music artist, while others are created to market goods or services to the world.

No matter what your reason is for making one, it needs to capture the attention of those that visit it. Tracking your visitors doesn’t have to be a complicated or expensive process. There are plenty of user friendly and inexpensive tools to help you do this.

Piwik is a nifty little tool that will help a blog or website owner gather information about their daily visitors. This Google Analytics competitor will offer you numerous widgets to work with. It also has four basic components which are visitors, actions, referrers, and dashboard.

Each section contains several analytical widgets that can be easily changed by an administrator. Data is presented in a number of ways such as a pie chart, bar graph, or just simple writing format. Users can view multiple reports on their website or blog and judge how well their traffic is flowing.

What makes Piwik so different from other web analytic software is that it smartly has its features contained inside plugins. Adding or removing unwanted features can be done in an instant without a long winding process. If you have a little more programming experience, then you can even build your own well functioning plugins. One of the best things about Piwik is that it’s open source format allows you to customize it according to your needs.

Any data that you gather from Piwik will be installed on your personal server. In order to get your statistics, use open API’s to do so. Users can quickly publish their date in several different formats such as CSV, PHP, and XML. You are the complete owner of your data and won’t have to worry about a service holding it hostage.

Working within the Piwik interface is extremely simple because it offers a drag and drop functionality. The ability to customize the interface according to your own personal preferences and needs is a definite bonus. Although it is still under Beta development, Piwik offers serious competition to the more established Google Analytics.

If you have been desiring a bit more control over your stat reports and would love to be able to customize your analytics program, then consider trying Piwik. It won’t cost you a dime to play with it for a while and see if it is worth your time.

You can also check out a previous article I wrote on another cool web analytics tool for your website called Clicky. Microsoft also has it’s own web analytics tool called Gatineau. Finally, check out ClickTale if you want to see actual video recordings of how your users interact with your website.