FAQ › General Concepts

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

Answers

  1. 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.

    Piwik will process your visitor logs and build the reports when you request them, assuming your config file has the default value to enable real time reporting: enable_browser_archiving_triggering = 1

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

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

  2. 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, ...).

    Currently Piwik reports unique visitors by day. There is a feature request for adding Unique Visitors for weeks and months, see the related ticket.

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

    If a visitor comes to your website for the first time, or if he visits a page 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.

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

  4. 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!

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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!

  9. 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.

  10. 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:

    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!

  11. 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".

  12. 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/.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. 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.

  16. 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.

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