7 Reasons Why Your Commercial Site NEEDS Piwik…
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
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 ; category Using Piwik Effectively ; RSS comments.
June 17th, 2009 at 5:42 am
Awesome stuff. Waiting for those exciting tips. Piwik is great. awesome!
June 17th, 2009 at 8:32 am
[...] Auf dem offiziellen Piwik-Blog wurde nun eine Beitragsreihe gestartet, die sich um den effektiven Einsatz von Piwik dreht. Den Auftakt macht der Eintrag “7 Gründe warum eine kommerzielle Seite Piwik benötigt” (7 Reasons Why Your Commercial…. [...]
June 17th, 2009 at 9:30 am
And 1 reason why it doesn't: performance.
I have tried Piwik on one of our busiest sites with 200K+ pageviews, with piwik on pretty much a dedicated server, and it took the whole server down to a crawl.
Fiddled around with some indexes on the db which improved it a bit (i already had the initial indexes) and turned off browser archiving, which improved it a bit, but still no reall production performance.
Definitely an area which needs more work. You can contact me for more info if you want.
June 17th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Hey Hans,
Thanks for the feedback, emailed you already will get some further details from you and then go from there.
I've got a few dedicated server's I dont mind experimenting with to see why you would be crawling thus not effecting your site.
Cheers
Marc
June 17th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Most of the topics are handled by WebTrends Analytics similar - but it is not free and not cheap.. But it has some features, Piwik is missing (in the moment)
Michael
June 17th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Definitely liking some features like live visitors, but I find that content drilldown is a bit harder to go, given the interface. (ie, why did this happen on this day…)
June 18th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
We daily use piwik reports to analyze our traffic , but more tips are always wellcome :)
June 18th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
[...] 7 Reasons Why Your Commercial Site NEEDS Piwik [...]
June 20th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
The features that would help me most in the commercial environment are things which still appear only in the web logs. These include page weight to help reduce bandwidth, a general bandwidth counter from images and downloads, error codes (404, 500, etc), and page load/response times.
As for performance, though running the reports can hit our admin server a little bit, my Piwik tracking site receives about 500K+ pageviews per day per server in the farm and I haven't ever noticed the PHP process at more than a few % CPU. The DB server is also barely affected.
However, I've focused on splitting the tracking role which hands out the JS from the admin interface where we log in and run reports, as well as ensuring the DB server can handle the production load, which is many orders of magnitude harder than the Piwik piece.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Yeah, definitely 7 good reasons to get you started working with Piwik.
June 26th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Piwik is really a good tool.
But I think that it needs a lot of mysql connections.
I'm not 100% sure about this but I have never had any issues with my webserver until I installed Piwik. While opening the dashboard I sometimes need to wait very long or I get "too many connections" error. Could this be an issue?
If this can be fixed it will be a really great statistic!
June 27th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Real seven reasons to try Piwik;)
Thanks, going to post some review on my blog
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:43 am
yup. Two thumbs up for open source.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
I have followed the progress of Piwik for quite some time, and so far i really like it, i am planing to use it in my work. I am just having one issue, and it's your database backend choice. Are there any plans for supporting other databases ? Specifically postgresql is of interest to me.
Other than that, i can only thank you for providing a free alternative to google's analytics that you can host privately :)
July 10th, 2009 at 8:28 am
Piwik is really a good tool but not for big sites.
MySQL or any other RDBMS doeasn't fit to project like this. You need middelware with ram database and disk,rdbms persistence like redis.
July 10th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
[...] have on their website 7 reasons why your commercial site needs Piwik all of which seem like very good reason to use [...]
July 18th, 2009 at 7:19 am
Ich habe mich von Google Analytics getrennt und im gleichen Atemzug für Piwik entschieden und bis heute habe ich diesen Schritt nicht bereut. Die Anwendungen sind genau das was ich brauche und die Benutzerfreundlichkeit ist sehr hoch. Ich habe zwar noch nicht alle Funktionen im Detail verstanden aber man kernt ja bekanntlich nie aus.
Piwik, mach weiter so!!
July 20th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Excellent tool, we especially like that Piwik works real time and we don't have to share data with google anymore.
July 21st, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Die Anwendungen sind genau das was ich brauche und die Benutzerfreundlichkeit ist sehr hoch
July 24th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
mit Google Analytics macht man nur Google noch schlauer, wir werden in kürze umstellen.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Hi
It was an interesting and useful article.And it is good to know that 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
July 31st, 2009 at 2:59 am
Within a few weeks our site will drop GA in favor of Piwik (>15,000 pages / 250k unique visitors p/m).
July 31st, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Piwik more accurate then GA! and also Live. I recomend it.
August 4th, 2009 at 1:10 am
This project represents the amazing power of open-source development. A great product!
August 5th, 2009 at 12:20 am
Just installed piwik, great product. I now own my own data now, wow.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
[...] you maybe have interesting in 7 Reasons Why Your Commercial Site NEEDS Piwik…, #1 You Own The Data #2 Fully Expandable Feature Set Just Like Wordpress #3 API Developer Access #4 [...]
August 9th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Awesome stuff. I think there are even more than 7 reasons for using Piwik.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:44 am
http://wpdig.com also use piwik.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
there are still some bugs, but the tool is great. we use it on serveral pages. thx a lot guys.
August 13th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Hi marc
Same problem here (as hans raker described), can you maybe contact me? We've tried now different approaches to make it work without slowing down our site, but so far didn't got anywhere. (We have around 150T page views a day)
August 14th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
I totally agree with Hans about the performance issue on production websites.
Need improvements.
August 15th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Is there any way to install on a local machine and then download the web logs file?
August 17th, 2009 at 6:56 am
Are there any performance stats available?
August 17th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Good open source development product
August 21st, 2009 at 4:15 pm
We are on phpmyvisites currently and - yes - not dissatisfied. Anyone here who has used phpmyvisites.php script and can compare with piwik?
Regards
August 26th, 2009 at 5:02 am
How does this show the keyword search data? The reason I ask is that I just ran a report in Google, it read; "25 other unique queries"
Not exactly helpful when trying to mine data for clients and adwords campaigns. Maybe I should run them both and see what happens. I don't think turning off Google is a good idea if you are buying traffic from them on Adwords because the programs need to relay data back and forth.
Otherwise it could be too much work to mine data. Anyone doing heavy PPC using this?
Thanks,
Ken
August 26th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Good thing. Very useful information.
August 27th, 2009 at 12:16 am
If you want to be taken seriously, leave the FUD about data ownership alone and tell me how the product is better than something like Google Analytics. You're making the same mistake most Linux advocates make and trying to use an ideological argument when most people care about what they can do with the product.
Tell me how your product is better *at web analytics*. You're asking me to host my own software which comes with some overhead, however slight. What are the tangible advantages to doing this? AS A PRODUCT, what do you do differently and why might that be of interest to me? Don't try to scare me with spooky data stories, lay out the facts.
I do understand the data issue you're on about, but this post, and the site approach, seem to say 1) we kick ass 2) don't let others own your data. Neither of those specifically tell me anything about your product. You're using an emotional appeal to a crowd that by definition likes data and is analytical.
September 1st, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Great work, I love it…
Using it right now on my site http://www.givemebeats.net and I love the live updates.
I recommend it to anyone who wants to have their own data.
And just so y'all know, those who try to compare PIWIK and GA, trying to favor one over the other, it won't hurt to use both on your site… so stop the madness and all love for PIWIK
So well, enjoy!
September 10th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Thank you very much for your article
My friend refers to join in this site
But I had little confusion that is PIWIK is better than others and what advantages it have? etc…
But your article provides solution to all my queries about PIWIK
September 15th, 2009 at 12:49 am
It's just good to see open source products making their way into the mainstream, especially in the web analytics field.
September 17th, 2009 at 7:44 am
Piwik is the best solution, ´cause you´re independet from any other tracking systems like Google analytics or whatever!
September 18th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Piwik is really a good tool. I very like it.
September 28th, 2009 at 2:12 am
I've built my own stats program… I'll be sticking with it since it's flexibility is unparalled in comparison to the closed source alternatives…
But I will certainly be taking a look inside this code for some good pointers…
Also… Nice Graphs!!! Thank you so much for sticking it to Google Analytics… maybe those of us who can find the information we need to know… since we own it… and can actually get what we want from it… will pull ahead in the years to come…
October 14th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
[...] Lindsay gives 7 reasons why your website needs piwick. You own the data. Just like wordpress, it has a fully-expandable feature set. It has API [...]
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Wir lieben Piwik. Piwik ist eines der Besten Tools für Tracking. Wir setzen es auch bei unseren Kunden für Tracking und Analysen ein. Weiter so..
October 29th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
For me, reason #1 " You Own The Data" is the single most important feature.
October 30th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
I was unaware that my web developer had installed piwik and wondering how to get an analysis of my visitors being a new site. Piwik seems to answer most of my questions except how to find the search words used but no doubt I'll work that one out. Thank you.
October 31st, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Piwik is really a great tool. A MUST have for every webmaster! I like very much this great work of the piwik team!
November 5th, 2009 at 5:58 am
@rick: One reason I use Piwik instead of Google Analytics is because Google Analytics is not able to track pages within my company's SSO. With Piwik installed within my own network, my SSO do not block the data flow.
I presume this is the type of benefits that you are looking for?
But I must admit, this is due to the architecture demanded by the ancient, internally developed SSO. Not many would face similar issues, I guessed.
November 13th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
I'm testing Piwik and must admit that it's great. … and waiting for the IP exclude option!
November 25th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Installed Piwik today on a dedicated server. My website is hosted in the US while I have hosted Piwik in France. Most of my visitors are from France and other Francophone countries. So it would be interesting to see the challenges it poses. I can see the DB size counter moving in frenzy.
Anybody has any inputs on how to manage the size and efficient indexing of the DB generated by Piwik?
All in all, first impression : good job Piwik team. Keep it going.
December 6th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
We are also using piwik and are quite happy about it.
It is fast, private and free.
Also what I really appreaciate is customization !
Keep up the good work guys !