Piwik Analytics

So I have been implementing a new piece of analytics software named Piwik, and what do you know it's really good! Piwik markets itself as the alternative to Google Analytics, and although it is really good it still doesn't have all of the bells and whistles that Google Analytics has. It is easily extend able though, I have been working on a Piwik plugin that uses the Max Mind GeoCity Lite database and Bing Maps. As a side note, Piwik has horrible documentation. It is probably the worst documentation I have ever seen. What makes this worse is that it is backed by a company called OpenX, their main product is an open source ad server by the same name. So in my mind they should have much better documentation, Code Igniter is a free open source product with phenomenal documentation. This lack of documentation has kept me away from this particular package for some time but I finally decided to take the plunge, and I am glad I did!

Ok, so how does Piwik compare to Google Analytics? Well, it has all of the same information that Google has save the geocoding, but there is a GeoIP plugin that fixes that. Although it has all of the same information that Google has, it's reports are quite primitive. For instance, although all of the information is available to you the interface seems a bit lacking. The plugins are limited in horizontal real estate so sometimes the information can be cut off unless you are using a high resolution. But that is a minor gripe and I am sure it will be fixed soon. The main selling point is that all of the data collected sits in your own personal database, this is extremely cool. As a former junior admin for a fairly large data warehouse I see a lot of potential in the data mining. I have already set up a few tests and was able to quickly generate SQL queries that reported on different trends such as highest bounce rates across different sites, most visited sites and also tally up exactly how many page views were generated from an internal site link and which page that link came from. This is all important stuff that web masters like to keep track of. Google Analytics will only show you stats about a single site, but with Piwik it is possible to track trends across multiple domains and compare that data. Very Cool stuff.

So far after about two weeks of testing it is becoming apparent that the information that Piwik provides is awesome, but the power lies in it's ability to be expanded and used by other applications. Just imagine the possibilities of using your Google analytics data on the fly in your own applications, this could be extremely useful for e-commerce, geo-targeting, accessibility and even navigation. I would suggest to check it out, it takes about five minutes to install and about another five minutes to setup.

I just hope that better documentation becomes available because plugin development can get tedious with only about a third of the API documented.