FAQ › General Concepts

  1. How is a Unique Visitor counted in Piwik?
  2. How is a 'visit' defined in Piwik?
  3. What is the 'super user' in Piwik?
  4. Are Piwik reports real time?
  5. How long does the Piwik archiving process take for high traffic websites - or hundreds of websites?
  6. A search engine is counted as a website referer. How can I add the search engine to Piwik?
  7. Can I help translate Piwik into my native language?

Answers

  1. How is a Unique Visitor counted in Piwik?

    Unique Visitors is the number of visitors coming to your website; Unique Visitors are determined using cookies. If the visitor doesn't accept cookie, a simple heuristic is used to try to match the visitor to a previous visitor with the same features (IP, resolution, browser, plugins, OS, ...).

  2. How is a 'visit' defined in Piwik?

    If a visitor comes to your website for the first time, or if he comes returns to your website 30 minutes after his last page view, this will be recorded as a new visit.

    You can change this value for measuring visits (session timeout) in the configuration file (config/global.ini.php) by adjusting the visit_standard_length value (defaults to 1800 seconds, 30 minutes).

  3. What is the 'super user' in Piwik?

    The super user is the only user who has the ability to create other users and websites. There is only one super user per instance of Piwik. The super user is created during the installation process. The super user's login and password are stored in the Piwik configuration files in config/config.ini.php. All other users details are stored in the database.

    The super user has superpower!

  4. Are Piwik reports real time?

    By default Piwik reports are real time when you select "today" in the calendar. Piwik will look at all your logs for today in the database and process the reports every time you request them.

    By default, reports are kept for 10 seconds. You can change this value in config/global.ini.php:
    time_before_archive_considered_outdated = 10

    For example, if you want Piwik to process today's logs only once an hour, you would set time_before_archive_considered_outdated = 3600

  5. How long does the Piwik archiving process take for high traffic websites - or hundreds of websites?

    Every night, if you setup auto-archiving, Piwik will run through the logs and compile all your reports for each day, week, month and year. How long the process will take depends on your traffic, number of visits and pages, on the number of websites you have setup in Piwik... and of course on your server performance.

    For example, using version 0.2.26 on a single core duo2 server with 3GB of ram, Piwik archiving process takes about 25 minutes for 70 000 unique visitors (and more than 250 websites).

    These numbers will be better soon: making Piwik faster is a top priority. We are planning to do load & performance testing in early 2009. We have several ideas on how to make things better, we'll let you know. Stay tuned... or come and help us if you know how to design software to make it faster.

    Also, if you have a medium or high traffic website, we would be interested to hear your experience with Piwik archiving. How long does archiving take for your traffic, how many visitors/pages, how many websites, what type of server; You can let us know by email.

  6. A search engine is counted as a website referer. How can I add the search engine to Piwik?

    Search engines are defined in the file core/DataFiles/SearchEngines.php

    Each search engine is defined by a new line with the following format:
    "main-url.com" => array( "Search engine name", "keyword parameter", [optional charset used by the search engine])

    For example, for Yahoo!
    "search.yahoo.com" => array("Yahoo!", "p"),

    The main search engine URL has to be at the top of the list for the given search Engine.
    When adding a search engine, please also add the search engine icon in the directory plugins/Referers/images/SearchEngines.php directory (example).

    Please submit to the Piwik team the new search engine line in SearchEngines.php and the icon; we will add it for the next release!

  7. Can I help translate Piwik into my native language?

    Of course you can! We love having people help us make sure Piwik is available to as many people as possible in a language they understand. If you can translate or help translate into a language we do not have, we would love to hear from you. Email translations@piwik.org to get started!

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