FAQ Piwik

If you have a question for us at Piwik that has not been answered before, feel free to flick us an email at hello@piwik.org and we shall pop the answer up here for all to see. Thanks!

New to Piwik

1. What is Piwik?
2. How is Piwik different to Google Analytics and other web analytics tools?
3. How does Piwik work?
4. Is there an online demo available?
5. Can Piwik manage multiple user accounts?
6. How do I track several websites, domains and multiple subdomains in Piwik?
7. How do I define and track Goal conversions?
8. How do I improve accuracy of visitors' Country detection, and enable Cities and Regions tracking?
9. How do I track Ecommerce orders, details of purchased products and abandoned carts on my website?
10. How does Piwik ensure Privacy of my Analytics data, and Privacy of my website Visitors?
11. How does Piwik track downloads?
12. What are Outlinks, Clicks or Unique clicks?
13. Does Piwik track visitors without Javascript? Does Piwik track search engine bots or other spider / robots?
14. Can I use Piwik and Google Analytics / Yahoo! Analytics / WebTrends etc. at the same time?
15. How do I know when new versions are released?
16. Where can I get support?
17. How much does Piwik cost?
18. Is there any Data Limit in Piwik? Is it possible to keep all historical data?
19. Does Piwik track visits from Mobile devices (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Palm Pre, low end mobile phones, etc.)?
20. Can I use Piwik and provide analytics Hosting service? What are the requirements for Piwik Hosted as a service?
21. Can I rebrand or sell or reuse or re-license or include Piwik in my product, company, or website?
22. Does Piwik work on high traffic websites? What is the performance like with millions of pages views per month?
23. Can I customize the Piwik logo in the reports, emails and login screen?
24. Can I get the data from the Piwik API web services and publish, reuse, process this data in a non GPL software?
25. Does Piwik work in a load balanced environment? How do I setup Piwik for high scale tracking?
26. Where does the name Piwik come from?
27. How do I pronounce Piwik?
28. Who is the team behind Piwik?
29. Where do I find Video Tutorials teaching how to use Piwik?

Installation

1. How do I install Piwik?
2. What are the requirements for installing Piwik?
3. Is there a Video that explains how to Install Piwik?
4. Can I use a database other than MySQL, like Postgresql, SQLite, Oracle?
5. Do I need to create a MySQL database?
6. How do I find out which version of PHP I have?
7. My Web host supports PHP4 by default. How can I enable PHP5?
8. Do I need to use PHP on my websites to use Piwik?
9. Is Piwik compatible with Nginx?
10. Is Piwik available as one click installation in cPanel, Softaculous, SimpleScripts, Webmin or other tools?
11. Is Piwik compatible with Windows, IIS or Apache, or Microsoft Web Platform Installer?
12. How do I configure Piwik when the server is installed behind a proxy?
13. How do I specify to use Mysql on a custom port or to connect Mysql over a socket?
14. How can I reinstall Piwik? Can I keep the existing data?
15. I want to migrate Piwik and move it to a new domain or a new subdomain URL, with the same MySQL server. How should I proceed?
16. How can I move Piwik from one server to another, also migrating the data from one mysql server to another?
17. How do I use the database to store session files, instead of storing sessions in files?
18. How do I uninstall Piwik?
19. How do I backup Piwik data and files?
20. How do I enable unicode characters (Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) in graphs in PDF/HTML reports and Piwik Mobile graphs?

Update

1. What version of Piwik do I have?
2. What should I do when I want to update Piwik to the latest version?
3. How do I backup my MySQL database?
4. How do I restore my MySQL database?
5. How do I enable Maintenance mode (to display a maintenance message in Piwik, and disable tracking) prior to updates?
6. What should I do when the upgrade failed with "Syntax error or access violation: 1142 INDEX command denied to user"
7. After the update, I get sql errors, I would like to try the update again. How do I force Piwik to re-upgrade the database from a past version?
8. I would like to test early beta and RC releases, how do I enable automatic updates to use these development versions?

How to

1. How do I make Piwik faster?
2. How do I import Google Analytics data in Piwik?
3. How do I White Label Piwik, to change the Logo, the Colors, add custom widgets, etc.
4. How do I exclude traffic from an IP or a range of IP addresses?
5. How do I exclude URL query parameters from the URLs tracked, and from Pages reports?
6. How do I set the time zone for my reports?
7. How do I specify the currency used in the Goals revenue reports?
8. How do I specify which websites to load by default in Piwik?
9. How to specify the date used by default in Piwik reports?
10. How do I control the categories tree structure in the Page URLs and Page titles reports?
11. After the top 500 or top 1000 rows, Piwik automatically groups pages, keywords, websites, etc. under the label "Others"; How can I force Piwik to not limit the data?
12. How do I force the reports to be re-processed from the logs?
13. How do I force Piwik to use SSL (https) for improved security?
14. How to track error pages (404 pages) in Piwik? Which URLs are 404 and which referers lead to these pages?
15. How do I track visits on my intranet?
16. How do I automatically login my users in Piwik when they go from my CMS to Piwik?
17. How do I enable users to login into Piwik inside an iframe?
18. How do I specify the URL that users should be redirected to, when they logout of Piwik?
19. How do I delete all statistics for a given website, or for all websites?
20. How do I set some of my website directories or pages to not be tracked?
21. How do I get reports for a custom date range?
22. How do I search within reports?
23. How do I change the default email address "From:" in PDF reports emails?
24. How do I send Piwik emails using Gmail SMTP server?
25. On a Windows server using IIS, the pages "Default.aspx" and "default.aspx" are tracked as different pages, but they are the same. How do I force Piwik to record them as the same page?
26. How do I track my RSS/Atom feed subscribers?
27. How do I momentarily disable Piwik User Interface and/or Piwik visitor Tracking?
28. How do I enable "Unique Visitors" metric for Yearly reports and for Custom Date Ranges?
29. How do I setup Piwik to track multiple websites without revealing the Piwik server URL footprint which appears in the Javascript code in all websites?
30. How do I enable third party tracking cookies, as well as the existing first party cookies?
31. How do I customize the Piwik Campaign parameters pk_campaign and pk_kwd?
32. How do I configure outgoing (forward) proxy in Piwik (eg. squid)?
33. How do I exclude / ignore my traffic from Piwik?
34. I forgot my password or username, how do I reset my password?
35. How do I find the visitor IP Addresses?
36. How do I select IP addresses or Visitor ID directly from the database?
37. How do I record tracking data in the past, and tell Piwik to re-process the past reports?
38. How do I get the GeoIP databases to improve accuracy of Country detection, and detect visitors' Cities and Regions?
39. How do I install the GeoIP Geo location PECL extension?
40. How do I install the GeoIP module for Apache for accurate Geo location data?
41. How do I install the GeoIP module for Nginx?
42. How do I apply accurate geolocation to old visits, after updating to Piwik 1.9?
43. How do I get company and ISP information using GeoIP databases?
44. How do I make "Transitions" feature work faster on high traffic websites?
45. How do I see the pages that most visitors landed on? How do I access the top pages people use before leaving the websites?
46. How do I tell Piwik to track Unique Visitors based on the Visitor ID cookie, instead of using IP Address?
47. How do I enable tracking for visitors without Javascript?
48. How do I take notes of particular events influencing my traffic?
49. How do I get the Visitor Geo Location data from the Visitor IP?

Plugins

1. List of Piwik plugins
2. How do I install a new plugin?
3. How can I build a Piwik plugin?
4. How do I report a bug in a plugin?

General

1. Are Piwik reports in real time?
2. How is a 'unique visitor' counted in Piwik?
3. How is a 'visit' defined in Piwik?
4. What is an 'Entry page'?
5. What is an 'Exit Page'?
6. What is the 'super user' in Piwik?
7. What is the 'admin' permission in Piwik?
8. What is the 'view' permission in Piwik?
9. What is the token_auth and where can I find this token to use in the API calls?
10. Can I install Piwik on one server and track visits on websites that are hosted on other servers?
11. How long does the Piwik archiving process take for high traffic websites - or hundreds of websites?
12. Is the Piwik Javascript Tracking Code XHTML 1.0 compatible?
13. Why are there sometimes 0 visits, but some conversions recorded, for example for a Keyword, a Website or a Custom Variable?
14. Piwik attributes conversions to the last seen referrer by default. How do I credit conversions to the first referrer instead?
15. A search engine is counted as a website referer. How can I add the search engine to Piwik?
16. What is "page title not defined" in the Page titles report?
17. What is "page url not defined" in the Pages report?
18. In the Providers report, what does "IP" mean?
19. What does "Keyword not defined" mean in the Referers > Search Engines keywords report?
20. Can I help translate Piwik into my native language, or improve the existing translation?
21. Does the Piwik Tracking tag work on https (SSL) pages?
22. Does Piwik support Google Analytics campaign parameters (utm_campaign, utm_medium, utm_source, utm_term)?
23. What is a Product SKU in the Ecommerce Analytics report?
24. When I enable "Purge old logs" in the Privacy settings, how do I make sure that no historical data is lost?
25. How many Custom Variables can I set to visitors and/or page views?
26. How can I become an official Piwik Consultant?
27. Privacy policy: How do I update my privacy policy to explain Piwik Analytics?
28. What are the cookies created by Piwik?
29. How do I disable all cookies for a visitor?
30. When cookies are disabled by a visitor, how does it impact Piwik reports accuracy?

Troubleshooting

1. Piwik doesn't track any visits and pages, and shows "There is no data for this report" in all reports.
2. Visits from search engines or campaigns are not recorded, Piwik shows "There is no data for this report" for all Referrers reports.
3. Piwik doesn't track Downloads and Outlinks on my website.
4. Piwik doesn't detect accurately the Country and/or Continent of my visitors.
5. Piwik is slow! It takes a long time to load widgets, reports and pages.
6. Statistics from Piwik and my other web analytics tool (log analyzer, webalizer or javascript based) are different, why?
7. After I updated Piwik, it stopped working (blank page, widgets not loading, error message, etc.). How can I fix this?
8. The graphs (pie chart, bar chart, evolution graph) are not showing in my Piwik.
9. The sparklines (small graphs like ) are not showing in my Piwik.
10. Piwik reporting UI doesn't have any css style or, the menu text appears on a white background. How to fix this display problem?
11. When tracking visits on an intranet website, Piwik assigns all page views to a few visitors who have very high page views count. How to fix it?
12. The World map is not showing in my Piwik.
13. The Piwik Javascript code shows a red cross (on IE) or a broken image icon instead of the 1*1 transparent Pixel, what is the issue?
14. How do I configure Piwik when mod_security is enabled?
15. Only one or a small number of days/months/date ranges are showing 0 zero visits, but other periods are working as expected.
16. The numbers from Transitions don't match other numbers shown in Piwik. Why?
17. How do I delete historical Piwik data? (purge old logs and/or old processed reports)
18. I would like to import an existing Users database (login, password, emails) in Piwik, but the usernames and passwords are more permissive than what Piwik allows. How do I disable the checks on the Logins & Passwords?
19. Piwik doesn't show me when new updates are available, and the SEO plugin doesn't work.
20. "Segmentation fault Error". Piwik reporting or via cron crashes with Segmentation Fault error. What to do?
21. I get the error message: "Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required XYZ in /path/piwik/XYZ.php on line X". How can I get Piwik to work?
22. What should I do when I get the error message: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11)
23. I get the error "Warning: gzuncompress() [function.gzuncompress]: data error" when looking at my Piwik reports.
24. Emails sent from Piwik use the email address @defaultHostnameIfEmpty.example.org, how do I specify my domain name instead?
25. Piwik reports this error and fails: "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted (tried to allocate X bytes)". What should I do?
26. Piwik reports this error and doesn't continue: "Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in ..."
27. How do I fix the error "Mysql Server has gone away"?
28. Graphs in PDF/HTML reports and/or Piwik Mobile do not display characters correctly in my language (display squares instead).
29. When I use http with force_ssl_login=1 or force_ssl=1, I get "Too many redirects". Also when I use https, CSV/PDF reports and graphs don't work.
30. Why am I getting a warning about an untrusted hostname?
31. When included in an IFrame, Piwik reports do not load. How do I allow Piwik reports to load from within an iframe?
32. I'm a developer, how do I enable logging (and / or SQL profiling) in Piwik?
33. Widgets don't load. I get the error message: "Fatal error: Class '...' not found in ... What's wrong?
34. How do I fix the error 'Unable to find the wrapper "https" - did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?'
35. How do I disable the OPTIMIZE queries which take too long on my server?

Piwik and OpenX

1. What is OpenX?
2. What is the link between Piwik and OpenX?
3. What does the OpenX ad server do?

Piwik and phpMyVisites

1. What is Piwik?
2. How is Piwik different to phpMyVisites?
3. What is going to happen to phpMyVisites?