Piwik # Open source web analytics

Guest Blogger Marc Lindsay Is An Internet Marketer & Runs An SEO Company - LT SEO

This is the first post of a new series all about "Using Piwik Effectively" and in a live environment.  Designed to help both businessman & hobbyist make the most out of Piwik.

Analytics Set Free - No More Constraints

There is no doubt that we are now in a world where digital data, bits & bytes, 1's & 0's all have a value, and a very significant value at that.  Just look at Google as a classical example of how valuable the digital world has now become.

Without data Google would have nothing to work with and I would be out of a job.

Previously when using say radio advertising or TV slots it has been a very hit and miss sort of game.  You don’t have an in-depth view into EXACTLY what it is that your viewer is looking for, so you would have to profile a demographic and then hope your offer or advert was appealing enough to spark interest.

Now bring it into today's digital world and you can track almost everything.

This puts an immense power in the beholder of the most data as not only would you know how people are using the internet, but you would also have so many small bits of data around each visitor that you are now able to start to profile your visitor or future customer.

So how on earth does this relate to Piwik?

Well…..

Let’s suppose you are using another of the many large third party tracking programs, who do you think owns all of that valuable data that is being tracked from your site?

It's certainly not you.  Sure you may be able to analyze that data and see some nice pretty reports, but at the end of the day that data does not belong to you and you are confined within the restraints that the third-party solution would put on you.

Now just imagine for a moment that you had access to a completely free piece of software that let you take control over your sites and the data collected from them….

Welcome To Piwik

Piwik is the ONLY software of its kind around that gives you total control over everything and the ability to expand and use your own data beyond your wildest dreams…

So on with the seven reasons.

#1 You Own The Data

This is one of the biggest reasons you would want to move to Piwik (this combined with #2 & 3) below and it becomes a knockout.

#2 Fully Expandable Feature Set Just Like Wordpress

We all know that wordpress out of the box is nothing special.  It’s just another blog solution, until you start adding in plugins to extend functionality.  You could almost say the same about the Iphone, it’s the applications that make it.

Well this is one feature that makes Piwik REALLY shine out, the developers when setting out to build the ultimate free open source tracking system developed it with expansion in mind and built into it a plugin system that lets you just tap on entire new modules of function with simply a few mouse clicks.

This is HUGE when combined with #1 & #3

#3 API Developer Access

Complete API access is something that has been built into Piwik right from the very core.  This means that you can access any data from within the current functions of Piwik and easily import it into your own application to even further enhance your experience.

If you need to access more data or access it differently then you can easily create a new plugin from #2 to handle and work with that data, this will then make it available as an API.

In case the alarm bells have not gone off in your head just yet let me put this in another way.

Let’s say that you wanted to be able to see the top 3 pages viewed by visitors by country.  No worries all you need to do is create a new plugin that adds that functionality in and hey presto you can now do this.  But taking this even further.

With the combination of points #1, #2 & #3 you can now create your own custom applications (adobe air, .NET, php or any other language you like) that can import any of this data and then use it however it likes.
Imagine if you could have a desktop application that when you opened it could show you the following at a glance.

1.    How much you had made today in sales & from what products.
2.    A comparison of today vs the same day last month.
3.    The weekly average of your sales also in comparison to last week.
4.    Your top performing traffic sources by ROI (because you custom created a plugin that let you set a specific traffic referrer by advertising budget with them)
5.    The top pages that converted into a sale for you

This is just a simple example of how you now have an ROI & Commerce relevant application based entirely off your Piwik data.

Amazing right?

(Feel free to get in touch with me about developing custom Adobe Air applications I am looking for someone to give us a hand).

#4 Real Time Tracking

As its on your own server you can refresh stats as much as you want and get up to the second traffic stats.

#5 Total Privacy

Do you really know what all of these third party services are doing with your data?  What if it were in any way able to help your competitor gain an advantage over you?

Not anymore you have Piwik

#6 It’s Free

Hey free is always good, just this good has sugar coated on top.  Of course it is important to note that there are server costs or hosting costs though if you are running a few websites this is already covered.

#7 It Will Make You More Money

If data is valuable, and you now own all of your data, by default you have increased your wealth digitally.  You can now very easily run custom search queries or strings across all of your sites, across all converted goals or products and find trends that you may never have even noticed.

Piwik being only 1 year old and already covering as much ground as it does really sets the future for what you can expect from Piwik.

As you can see Piwik really kicks butt and is a serious contender to the analytics game, one that in my opinion gives you more power than any of them.

I know it is giving us an edge over our competition by letting us develop custom applications and plugins that provide data in way that has never before been achieved.

Over the coming weeks I will be posting more Piwik guides on how you can leverage Piwik even further in a real environment with real sales coming through the door, these will be live case studies on sites making well over 7 figures.

Please if you have any queries or questions about topics you would like covered in this  Using Piwik Effectively, Marketing Series feel free to post them as a comment and I will take note of them all.

Cheers

Marc Lindsay

There are a lot of changes in Piwik 0.4. Today, I'm going to write about the release of an exciting new version of piwik.js, Piwik's JavaScript tracker. While the improvements are all under the hood, Piwik's client-side code is now a heavyweight contender to the trackers from the "Big 3" (i.e., GA, Y!A, and MS).

Inspired by Remy Damour's code contribution, planning and redevelopment of piwik.js began over 9 months ago. Over this period, we continued to maintain the legacy piwik.js while developing this new and improved version. We looked at the APIs of the "Big 3". We heard your complaints. We read your suggestions. We tackled your support requests. And after many code reviews and test cycles, we believe it's time to unleash the code.

On behalf of the Piwik community, I'd like to thank everyone who submitted bug reports, suggestions, and input that drove this rewrite.

Highlights

The new piwik.js is:

• Object-oriented.
  Multiple trackers on the same web page is now possible. And with the exception of legacy support, the code lives entirely in the Piwik namespace.
• Backwards compatible.
  You don't have to update the tracking code on your pages. Note: we have deprecated piwik_track(), piwik_log(), and global variables for configuration but backward compatibility will always remain.
• XHTML-friendly.
  The code no longer modifies the DOM. Specifically, the calls to document.write() — to attach the transparent 1×1 web bug image or to detect plugins in Internet Explorer — are history.
• Less restrictive.
  The code is more forgiving about where you insert the new tracking code in your pages. Also, custom data is now JSON stringified and no longer limited to a flat structure.
• Industry-conforming.
  The code now tracks the click event instead of mousedown.
• More customizable.
  Check out the API. For example, you can now define your own CSS classes for piwik_ignore, piwik_download, and piwik_link.
• Heavily tested.
  We added automated unit tests via QUnit. The code also passes JSLint and (Microsoft's) JavaScript Leak Detector.

Documentation

You can find the updated documentation for the revamped JavaScript tracking API here:

http://piwik.org/docs/javascript-tracking/

As always, we would appreciate your feedback. Thank you for using, supporting, and promoting Piwik.

This post is from Anthon Pang (aka "vipsoft"), new rockstar developer in the Piwik team.

This is a wonderful day for the Piwik community: Piwik just reached the 100,000 downloads milestone!!

Click on the image to view the real time Piwik Download Counter

This shows just how well received an open source web analytics alternative to Google, Yahoo and others is to the community. Thank you all for your support, messages, patches, bug reports, feedback, blog posts, this has been a very exciting journey!

Evolution of downloads

Check out the graph below that shows the evolution of Piwik downloads over months, since the first public release in March 2008:

Would you like to see this graph growing over the next few months? You can make it happen! We are working hard to release Piwik 1.0 (see the Piwik 1.0 roadmap) and YOU can help. We listed a list of things you can do to help, whether technically or creatively. Check out the list of 18 ways you can contribute to Piwik.

Stay tuned for future announcements. Thank you so much!

As a Piwik user, you are analyzing your website traffic. You are using the data to make your website better and increase its performance. Do you need to make money from your website? Do you need to serve ads? Would you like to serve ads from several ad networks, with advanced targeting options, extensive reporting on your ads performance… and serve these ads on multiple websites?

Serving ads on your website(s)

If you need to make money with ads on your website(s), check out OpenX ad server 2.8. The new version released earlier this week brings lots of new features and improvements!

• You can easily manage your ad inventory: manage advertisers, websites, all ads formats supported.

• Deliver what you want to whom you want: target users by country, campaigns frequency, and much more!

• Measure the performance of your ads: check out the extensive set of reports provides statistics on your websites and ad zones as well as your advertisers and ad campaigns, broken down by conversions, revenue, and more.

There are lots of options available and the product is available for download for you to install on your own server, or as a hosted version where you can get started and start serving ads in a few minutes!

Check out the OpenX Ad Server options:

• Try the online demo

• Download OpenX now! (requires PHP5 and Mysql or Postgresql)

• Sign Up for OpenX Hosted for FREE!

• OpenX Blog

• Developer zone (API, Plugins)

Video Tutorial

Getting Started with OpenX from OpenX Limited on Vimeo.

OpenX Screenshots

Campaign screen:

Link a banner to one or several of your website zones (ad slots):

Reporting screen:

OpenX Market

Finally, if you use OpenX, you can earn more money by monetizing your ad space using the OpenX Market.

OpenX Market is a new monetization service that provides you with a powerful way to expand your reach to advertisers who’d like to bid directly for your ad impressions. This means more advertisers will get to compete for your ad space, which translates into higher revenues for you, the publisher. Learn more about the OpenX Market and check out the Video Tutorial

An Intro to OpenX Market from OpenX Limited on Vimeo.

OpenX and Piwik

OpenX is the company behind the open source software program Piwik. The project leader (Matt) is employed by OpenX. Also, web analytics and ad serving are tightly coupled and we could imagine in the future some interesting integration between your adserving software and web analytics. You can learn more about OpenX and Piwik by reading the FAQ.

Have fun using Piwik… and making money using OpenX! Let us know what you think of 2.8 in the comments.

Hello all! It has been a while since our last piwik.org update, but behind the svn curtain, things are going strong.

We are proud to release Piwik 0.2.33 today!

After a month of bug fixing, please enjoy using the latest release of the most popular Open Source Web Analytics software! We believe we've fixed all outstanding bugs in Piwik (36 to be exact) and we've pushed a few improvements as well. Our objective for this release is to open the way for Piwik 0.4 that will include a few important new features (multi sites dashboard, new modular Javascript API, and more)  and provide a great stable web analytics tool. Download Piwik, spread the word, and enjoy your data!

The translation team is thriving:

They've added 5 new languages: Danish (Dansk), Greek (Ελληνικά), Estonian (Eesti keel), Galician (Galego) and Romanian (Română) and updated lots of the existing ones. Well done guys. Piwik is now available in 24 languages!

We have added a new page to check out the status of the Piwik translations, see the translators names and how much complete is each translation. Check out the Piwik Translations page!

There are lots of ways you can help making Piwik a better product!

We've added a new page How to contribute to Piwik? A few examples: Use Piwik, Help with testing, Help the community on the forums, Review the documentation, Help with translations, Submit a guest blog post, Spread the word about Piwik on your blog or twitter, Submit product suggestions and improvements, etc.

If you're a developer or a designer… well, add a new feature from our extensive list of great ideas, or help us make piwik look better!

Want to contribute to a great active open source project? Want to be part of the effort to build the leading open web analytics software? Check out the page How to contribute to Piwik? and contact us!

We are hearing more and more success stories from Piwik users that use Piwik to power their business by providing data insights, easy integration in their producs, deployed Piwik to hundreds or thousands of users. We're also hearing from webmasters that make use of Piwik simple reports and UI to analyze their websites and blogs, and optimize them to increase traffic and conversions.

This is all exiciting and Piwik community is slowly growing to support all these needs.

Have fun using Piwik, come help the project if you can… and stay tuned!

We are happy to announce a new category on the Piwik website: Piwik Consulting.

Piwik is highly extensible thanks to the Plugins Framework and the web service API. Custom Plugins can be developed to meet your business needs, add a new feature, or modify an existing functionnality. Piwik can easily be rebranded and offered as a white label web analytics solution to your customers or community users.

We have received many requests for custom paid plugins development from community users, companies, SEO experts. The Piwik team would redirect these demands to community members that we knew were available and knowledgeable about Piwik; to simplify this process and make it easier to find the right person to help you, we have created the Piwik Consultant directory. The Piwik Consultants listed are approved Piwik developers: their previous work on Piwik has been reviewed by the Piwik team and followed our quality guidelines and coding standards.

How can I become a Piwik Consultant?
We would like to get more qualified developers listed on the page. Please see the FAQ How can I become an official Piwik Consultant? for more information about what is required to be listed on the consulting page.

We hope that the Piwik Consulting program will be useful for users seeking quality Piwik related work. Piwik does not receive money from this program, but we encourage that the work is made open source, so that this benefits the whole Piwik community. We already had one plugin built thanks to this program, and we hope to see many more. Good luck to our consultants!

Friendly warning: blog post for software geeks only!

What is an "API" in Piwik and how to use it?

In Piwik, every plugin can expose its own API. Creating an API in a Piwik plugin is as easy as creating a class in a file called API.php; see example of the UserCountry/API.php API.

This class is then automatically loaded in Piwik and the public methods of the class are automatically available to call as a REST web service. For example, to call the method

public function getCountry( $idSite, $period, $date )

You can simply call:

index.php?module=API&method=UserCountry.getCountry&idSite=1&period=day&date=yesterday&format=xml&token_auth=X

You can see that the parameters idSite, date and period are automatically mapped from the URL to the original php function. This is where the magic happens, using the PHP Reflection API.

The page piwik/index.php?module=API&action=listAllAPI, available from the "API" link in the top bar of the Piwik user interface, will load all plugins API files, and automatically generate the "documentation", with example links to the calls.

How is this automatic REST API implemented in PHP5?

I have published a quick presentation about the concept behind the implementation of this API code. Here is the embed presentation:

You can also see the presentation on slideshare: "Easy rest service using PHP reflection api - on slideshare"

All the code used for this API functionnality is located in piwik/core/API/* ; you can browse this code online in the Piwik code browser. Feel free to reuse this code in your project, and submit any patch that you may have to the Piwik team.

If you're interested by this topic, see also the blog post: How to design an API?

Let us know your feedback or questions.

This post is from a Guest Blogger Arthur Lee from branica.com

You can say that I am a bit of an analytics freak since my background is financial and I typically work with analytical data and with spreadsheets. Now as a part-time webmaster, I find that using analytics is pretty important to optimize a site. I was intrigued with Piwik when it first arrived - especially as an alternative to Google Analytics.

When I was playing with Piwik on my site, I was looking to show my stats without having to give anonymous users view access to my stats. At the moment, it is only possible to show PiWik widgets publicly only if you give anonymous users view access. So I was curious to see if I could leverage Google Spreadsheets and the Piwik API to publish data and charts from Google Spreadsheets.

I have say that with the PiWik API is was really easy to use within Google Spreadsheets. Since Spreadsheets has the handy importXML function, it was a nice fit since the PiWik API can product its data in XML. It is also easy to change the Piwik API using normal spreadsheets functions. The result is the following Google Spreadsheet which has 3 pages to show you an example:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pxxUvud3iB_ZgeTOMg64jdw#

• Page 1 – Setup / Configuration

• Page 2 – Dashboard Example: This example shows how to make dynamic reports since you can change the number of “Top Website Referrers” or “Top Keywords”.

• Page 3 – Chart Example: In this example, the chart can be published anywhere as a simple image. No need for flash like Piwik widgets.

The above spreadsheet is in view only mode so you’ll need a Google account to make a copy of the spreadsheet to play around with it. Also, I have noticed a few times that Google may at times not get the XML data – just be patient. When you look at the spreadsheet, I have put in a simple setup page so you can change the reports for your site on Piwik. Just enter in your url where Piwik is installed, siteid and token_auth (that you can find on the API page in Piwik) and the reports will refresh automatically with your data!

The nice aspect of this is if you are using Piwik for commercial customers is that you can create all kinds of dynamic reports which operate in real time. I think the possibilities are pretty endless now. The only downside is the potentially performance impact of using many Piwik API calls.

Happy Reporting & Analysis!

Thank you Arthur for your guest blog post. If you would like to be a guest blogger on the Piwik blog (more than 1,200 readers!), please send us an email at hello@piwik.org ; we would love to publish your tutorial, Piwik hack or other Piwik web analytics findings!

This was a highly requested feature: provide a Changelog for Piwik. What has changed since my version of Piwik and the latest one? The Piwik changelog is now available. It has one entry per new Piwik version and lists all changes that have been made to Piwik in each version.

How do I know when there is a new Piwik release?
The Piwik Changelog page lists all recent Piwik versions and the list of changes. The best way to keep track of all new versions is to subscribe to the Changelog Rss Feed.

Also, check it the Piwik Live Download Counter (refreshed every minute!).

We have also just opened Piwik Forums so you may want to have a look :)

Today is an exciting day for Piwik: Sourceforge.net, the biggest repository of Open Source software, now offers a Free one click install Piwik to 150,000 Open Source project administrators. Each project can host their website on Sourceforge and track their web analytics using Piwik.

Screenshot of the one click install process on Sourceforge

From the Sourceforge newsletter

3. PIWIK WEB ANALYTICS

SourceForge.net-hosted projects and developers host their content in a
variety of places, including our Project Web service, our Developer Web
service, and external web sites. It's often unclear how many people you
are actually are actually reaching with your pages, and even more often
unclear where those users are in the world, what OS they are using, or how
long they are spending reading your pages. This is where web analytics
solutions come in to play.

SourceForge.net has launched the Piwik web analytics solution as part of
our growing Hosted Apps and Hosted Apps for Developers offerings, allowing
projects and developers to tag their web pages and obtain a comprehensive
set of analytics about their traffic. Piwik offers several ways to view
your analytics data, including dashboards, APIs and widgets that can be
embedded in your web pages — much more useful than a simple page counter.

For more information:
* Piwik added to Hosted Apps offering:
https://sourceforge.net/community/forum/topic.php?id=4148&page&replies=1

More information

We are in contact with Sourceforge and we will make sure Sourceforge always uses the latest best release of Piwik. This has the potential to become one of the largest sets of installs of Piwik in one place.

With Piwik APIs, open source codes, extended plugin architecture, providing Piwik to hundreds or thousands of small websites is just a few API calls away. Check out the Piwik API documentation, the Piwik Demo and of course, Piwik on Sourceforge!

When I gave a Piwik tshirt to my best friend Benji…

… who would have guessed it would end up 5000km from Europe, on the top of the magnificent Grand Canyon?

Thank you for this nice surprise!!

PS: We released 0.2.24 with a few bug fixes, database optimizations, we added Simplified Chinese language and the zip file is 500 kb lighter. We advise you to update Piwik!

If you are using Drupal to power your website you may be interested by the Piwik Integration for Drupal plugin.

This module automatically adds the Piwik tracking code to your Drupal website, as well as providing the following features:

• Selectively track certain users, roles and pages
• Monitor which files are downloaded from your pages
• Cache the Piwik code on your local server for improved page loading times
• Direct access to statistics in the reports section (D6+) using Piwik widgets and API

Screenshot Module activation

Piwik module settings in Drupal:

Access to simple reports from Drupal:

Example of a report in Drupal:

Thanks to the plugin team (and peter) for implementing new features!

More information about the Piwik Drupal plugin on the official drupal.org page

Piwik is growing by leaps and bounds and we are proud to say we now have thirteen translations for the latest release! I would like to thank all the translators and reviewers who worked very hard to make sure Piwik is available to as many people as possible. The translations currently available are: English, Catalan, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Traditional Chinese (NEW!) and Ukrainian.

See for example a screenshot of Piwik in Traditional Chinese (thanks to Eros for the translation!):

Currently we have six more translations in the works and there over 100 people working to make Piwik available in even more languages. This is a huge accomplishment and we are proud our users are willing to help out!

Most of the UI in Piwik can be translated. There are a few limitations (see related i18n ticket) that we will address soon: support for right to left languages, proper translations of graphs, advanced support for dates, etc.

How can I create a new translation file?

Maciej built a very simple plugin to help you translate Piwik very easily: on the left are displayed the English sentences to translate, and on the right a form where you can write the translation. At the end of the process you click the button, the file is automatically recorded, and the translation available in the UI for testing. The translation plugin can be found at http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/171 if you want to help.

I want to help starting a new translation or improve existing translation…

If you want to help with translations, please contact Noah at translations (at) piwik.org

Thanks again for everyone who helped and I look forward to seeing even more translations become available!

Noah

Today we are happy to release a new version of Piwik: 0.2.17. It includes more than 30 bug fixes and new features. See an online demo or Download the new version today!.
The main changes are:

• more than 30 bug fixes (we fixed most of the open bugs!)
• you can publish your stats in widgets (embedded in iframe) for all existing widgets. Click on the widget link on the top of the screen (example of such a widget below)
• you can now select the language from the User Interface
• … and choose between 12 available languages: English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, 日本語 (japanese), Nederlands, Polski, Português, Русский (Russian), and Українська (Ukrainian).
  If you want to translate Piwik into your language or contribute to an existing translations, please contact Noah (our awesome translation coordinator) on translations (at) piwik.org
• Piwik now detects Google Chrome
• … and looks nice in Chrome/Safari
• the Installer will now create the MySQL DB for you
• and we've introduced an Upgrade mechanism, so you can now easily upgrade from any version to the very latest that's available.

Most of these changes were already available in SVN and beta testers were enjoying them for a while, but we wanted to wait to finalize the Upgrade mechanism before releasing it publicly (so you can all upgrade easily).

How can I show widgets of my Piwik web analytics reports?
Just click on "Widgetize" on the top of your Piwik (or here for a demo) and simply preview the available widgets! Here is the widget that lists your unique visitors by country:

Note: for your reports to be publicly available you have to give anonymous users the right to view your reports (in Admin > Users).

How do I upgrade Piwik?

To upgrade Piwik, simply download the latest available version. Extract the .zip, upload the new Piwik files by overwriting your existing Piwik files and making sure your config/config.ini.php stays unchanged (it should by default). Go to yourwebsite.com/your/piwik/ and click on continue. You're done! :)

How do I know which version of Piwik I'm using?

If you look in the HTML source of Piwik you'll see a META tag with the version number:

<meta name="generator" content="Piwik 0.2.16" />

If you can't see this tag then you are using Piwik <= 0.2.9. If this is the case, we strongly recommend that you update to the latest version (download).

How do I know when new versions are released?

Subscribe to the Changelog page RSS feed. You can also suscribe to the blog (by rss or email - see the sidebar of this blog), or to register to the piwik-hackers mailing list (more info on the developer section). We will be adding an update check mechanism in Piwik so that you are notified when new versions of Piwik are published directly in the Piwik UI.

What's coming next?

We are aiming to fix more open bugs in the next releases and introduce an Update check in the UI so that you are notified when new versions are published. We are also working on a couple of other exciting new features (stay tuned on the blog for more details!).

Screenshot of the current release:

For any feedback, suggestion or messages of love, please contact us at hello@piwik.org

When you use Piwik, you own your web analytics data. All the data is stored in your database, and you can access it via the Piwik API (see an example of how to use the API).

Some Piwik users are making interesting use of the API. We recently heard of two different projects that show your web analytics reports in an Adobe AIR interface for slick reporting, on your desktop.

1) Desktop Web Analytics project (official website)

Benoit Pouzet, a french Piwik user, has built a (beta) Desktop Web Analytics - for Piwik. He has integrated nearly all the available reports in the UI!

He has also built new features like showing a world map of where your visitors are from:

The application calls the API to load the data in XML, and then processes it using the Adobe AIR framework. The result is a slick and new way of quickly checking your analytics. The app also handles several websites just like Piwik. You can install it in one click, it will add a shortcut on your desktop, and try it using the default profile loading data from the Piwik demo.

Good luck to Benoit for Desktop Web Analytics - for Piwik! See the website for more screenshots and information.

2) Piwik Connector (official website)

Tino Goetz has written a more simple AIR app, that lets you quickly visualize how many visitors come to all your Piwik websites, per hour, day. You can download the app on the website piwik connector.

Good luck to both Benoit and Tino for improving their Piwik AIR apps!