General Concepts

FAQ › General Concepts

Are Piwik reports real time?
How is a 'unique visitor' counted in Piwik?
How is a 'visit' defined in Piwik?
What is an 'Entry page'?
What is an 'Exit Page'?
What is the 'super user' in Piwik?
What is the 'admin' permission in Piwik?
What is the 'view' permission in Piwik?
Can I install Piwik on one server and track visits on websites that are hosted on other servers?
How long does the Piwik archiving process take for high traffic websites - or hundreds of websites?
Is the Piwik Javascript Tracking Code XHTML 1.0 compatible?
Does the Piwik Tracking tag work on https (SSL) pages?
What is "page title not defined" in the Page titles report?
What is "page url not defined" in the Pages report?
In the Providers report, what does "IP" mean?
A search engine is counted as a website referer. How can I add the search engine to Piwik?
Can I help translate Piwik into my native language?
How can I become an official Piwik Consultant?

Answers

Are Piwik reports real time?

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

By default, reports for today are processed every 10 seconds. Piwik Super User can change this value in the "General Settings" admin panel. For high traffic websites, we recommend processing the reports once every hour (3600 seconds).

For high traffic websites, we recommend "near real time" approach: please read the Setup auto archiving page for more information.
How is a 'unique visitor' counted in Piwik?

Unique Visitors is the number of visitors coming to your website; Unique Visitors are determined using 3rd party cookies.

If the visitor doesn't accept cookie (disabled, blocked or deleted cookies), a simple heuristic is used to try to match the visitor to a previous visitor with the same features (IP, resolution, browser, plugins, OS, ...).
How is a 'visit' defined in Piwik?

If a visitor comes to your website for the first time, or if he visits a page (or downloads a file) more than 30 minutes after his last page view, this will be recorded as a new visit. A Unique Visitor can make multiple Visits per day.

In the first visit, the visitor is a New Visitor. From the second visit (the same day or later), a Unique Visitor is a Returning Visitor.

You can change the 30 minutes value (session timeout) by overriding [Tracker] visit_standard_length = 1800 in your config/config.ini.php.
What is an 'Entry page'?

Entry page is the first page of a visit.

For each Entry Page URL, Piwik reports the number of Entrances (Visits that started on this page), Bounces (Visits that started on this page but left the website straight away) and Bounce rate.
What is an 'Exit Page'?

The Exit Page is the last page accessed during a visit.

Piwik reports the top Exit Pages URLs, the number of Exits, Unique Pageviews and Exit Rate. Exit rate (sometimes called "Page Exit Ratio") is the number of Exits from a page divided by total number of Page views of that page.
What is the 'super user' in Piwik?

The super user is the only user who has the ability to create users, create websites and install plugins. 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!
What is the 'admin' permission in Piwik?

You can create users and assign them the 'admin' permission on a given set of websites. Users with the 'admin' permission can grant other users the 'view' or 'admin' permission on the website(s) the user is set to 'admin'. Only the Super User can create websites, create users or manage plugins.
What is the 'view' permission in Piwik?

You can create users and assign them the 'view' permission on a given set of websites. Users with the 'view' permission can view all reports in Piwik for the website(s) the user is set to 'view'. The user cannot add other users, websites, or handle manage plugins.
Can I install Piwik on one server and track visits on websites that are hosted on other servers?

You can track as many websites as you like that are hosted on the same server as Piwik, or hosted on several external servers. Only the server that hosts Piwik needs to run PHP and MySQL.

You can create new websites by going to the admin area when logged in as Super User, and get the javascript tracking code to install on the websites you wish to track. For example, consider the following use case:
- You have a website built in Java hosted on server1
- You have a website built in Python hosted on server2
- You can install Piwik on server3, and track visits from the two other websites

Note about https: Piwik automatically detect if the page being tracked is https (SSL) and would include the piwik.js in secure mode from your Piwik server.
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 more load & performance testing. 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.
Is the Piwik Javascript Tracking Code XHTML 1.0 compatible?

Yes, Piwik Javascript Tracking code is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. See an example on http://piwik.org/xhtml/.
Does the Piwik Tracking tag work on https (SSL) pages?

The Piwik tag detects the protocol of the page being tracked and calls the normal or secure Piwik server.

To track your https pages correctly, your server hosting Piwik should work when called from https. For example, https://url/to/piwik/piwik.php should return a blank page. If https://url/to/piwik/piwik.php returns an error, please contact your sysadmin to ask him to enable SSL on the Piwik server.

Piwik users successfully use Piwik to report analytics of their Ecommerce, secure shops. There is also a ticket for an ecommerce plugin.
What is "page title not defined" in the Page titles report?

Piwik provides two reports for your page views: Page Titles and Page URLs. A page title is the content of the HTML <title> tag. If your pages do not define this <title> Piwik will instead report "page title not defined" for the visits on those pages.

We also highly recommend you use the latest version of the Javascript Tracking Tag in case you are still using the old Tracking tag.
What is "page url not defined" in the Pages report?

Piwik provides two reports for your page views: Page Titles and Page URLs. In some rare cases, a visitor's browser will not let the Piwik Tag request the current URL (generally for privacy reasons). If Piwik could not request the page URL from the browser, Piwik will instead report "page url not defined" for the visits on those pages.
In the Providers report, what does "IP" mean?

Piwik uses a special php function (gethostbyaddr) to request the hostname associated to a given IP. For example, the function would return "br76.comcast.net" and Piwik would categorize the visitor as using the provider "Comcast".

Sometimes however, for specific IPs or when the function times out, Piwik doesn't know which provider the visitor is using, and will simply report "IP".
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 path containing the keyword], [optional charset used by the search engine])

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

The macro {k} will be automatically replaced by the keyword to link to the search engine page for the keywords found in your Piwik reports. The main search engine URL has to be at the top of the list for the given search Engine.

Note that some search engines can have several variable names to define the keyword, you can specify an array of names. For example, for the search engine Baidu.com, the keyword can be found in "wd", "word", or "kw", and the keywords are encoded in the charset "gb2312". The line for Baidu.com looks like:

"www.baidu.com" => array("Baidu", array("wd","word","kw"), "s?wd={k}", "gb2312"),

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!
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. Please see Piwik Translations for more information.
How can I become an official Piwik Consultant?
We are always looking for more quality developers to join the Piwik fun! If you want to be listed on the Piwik Consulting page, you need to know about Piwik internals: please have a look at the developer documentation, the code and the coding standards that we use to review submitted code.

To be an official Piwik Consultant, you need to either:
- submit patches to some of the current issues, bugs, or features
- or submit a new plugin
We will then review your work and consider adding you in the official Piwik Consulting listing.

For inspiration, please have a look at the Piwik roadmap ; the list contains lots of interesting problems to solve, in different fields: performance and scaling, User Interface, Web analytics reports, core mechanisms, Plugins related tasks, etc.

If you need more information or if you want to become a Piwik consultant, please contact us at hello@piwik.org : we are looking forward to helping you!