New to Piwik

FAQ › New to Piwik

What is Piwik?
How is Piwik different to Google Analytics and other web analytics tools?
How does Piwik work?
Can Piwik manage multiple user accounts?
Is there an online demo available?
How do I know when new versions are released?
Can I rebrand or sell or reuse or re-license or include Piwik in my product, company, or website?
Can I get the data from the Piwik API web services and publish, reuse, process this data in a non GPL software?
Who is the team behind Piwik?
How does Piwik track downloads?
What are Outlinks, Clicks or Unique clicks?
Where can I get support?
Does Piwik track visitors without Javascript? Does Piwik track search engine bots or other robots?
Can I use Piwik and Google Analytics / Yahoo! Analytics / WebTrends etc. at the same time?
How do I pronounce Piwik?

Answers

What is Piwik?

Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software package. It provides detailed reports on your website and its visitors, including the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, which pages they like, the files they download… and so much more.

Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

Piwik is PHP MySQL software which you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the 5-minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track (or use an existing plugin to do it automatically for you).
How is Piwik different to Google Analytics and other web analytics tools?

Piwik is the leading open source web analytics software. However, there are dozens of other free and paid web analytics solutions; why choose Piwik?

One of the principle advantages of Piwik is that you are in control. Unlike remote-hosted services (such as Google Analytics), you host Piwik on your own server. The installation process is very simple, and Piwik is just as simple to use and understand.

All the program's features are built as plugins, which means you can easily add new plugins built by the community to customize your own Piwik installation. If you have specific needs then you can build a plugin that processes data in a different way.

Piwik is installed on your server, which gives you full control over your data. You can access the data easily via the Piwik API. Advanced users can also run manual queries on the database in order to build advanced reports.

Because you own your data, you don't make it available to third-party companies which might reuse this data for other purposes.

See also the blog post: Why Piwik is better than the competition.
How does Piwik work?

Piwik has to be installed on a server with both PHP and MySQL. At the end of the 5-minute installation, Piwik will give you a Javascript tag which you add to the bottom of each page of your website. Piwik will then record the activity across your website within your database. Piwik aggregates this data to provide detailed web analytics reports about your visitors, page views, referrer information, search engine keywords and much more!
Can Piwik manage multiple user accounts?

In Piwik, you can create an infinite number of users and websites to track.
For each user, you can set permissions to "view", "admin" or "no permission" for a specific website, or for all websites at once.

The permission system in Piwik is simple and makes it very easy to manage from a small number of websites and users to hundreds of websites and thousands of users. You can also use the Piwik UsersManager API to pragmatically add, remove, edit users and their permissions.
Is there an online demo available?

Yes, check out the online demo to see how awesome Piwik is!
How do I know when new versions are released?

The Piwik Changelog page lists all recent Piwik versions and the list of changes. The best way to keep track of all new versions is to subscribe to the Changelog Rss Feed.

To stay tuned about the latest Piwik developments, you can try the Piwik blog (by rss or email - see the sidebar of the blog) or register with the piwik-hackers mailing list (more info in the developer section). Also, when a new version is released, your Piwil will display a message inviting you to update to the latest version.
Can I rebrand or sell or reuse or re-license or include Piwik in my product, company, or website?

Reusing Piwik in any way is allowed as long as you respect the GPL license.

If you distribute a modified version of Piwik, or a software that includes Piwik as a module, or a website that includes Piwik as a service, you must give access to the code source and publish all the code under the GPL.

If your product, software, website is using Piwik but all your code stays within your company or server, you have the freedom to keep your code and not apply the GPL License to it. It is therefore allowed to propose Piwik as a service, or rebrand Piwik and sell it as a service to your customers. For example, you can change the header and footer to reflect your brand, change the colors, add new features on your Piwik. As long you don't "distribute" or sell the product to anyone, you are respecting the GPL license.

You may want to learn more about the GPL License and look at the GPL FAQ.

As well as respecting the GPL license, you must also reuse the word Piwik with care. Please see the Piwik Trademark page for more details about how to reuse the name Piwik in your modified version of Piwik.

Finally, if you modify Piwik and add new features or fix existing bugs, please submit your patches back to the Piwik team: together we will build the best open source web analytics software!
Can I get the data from the Piwik API web services and publish, reuse, process this data in a non GPL software?

Yes, the data coming from the Piwik API belongs to you and is not covered by the GPL. You can use Piwik as a service, and reuse, publish, display, modify, process the data coming from the Piwik API using the REST web service call - this is not allowed if you call the API when using Piwik as a PHP library (see how to call the API?).

See also the GPL FAQ: Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware designs, can I require that these designs must be free?
Who is the team behind Piwik?

Piwik is an open source collaborative effort with many people contributing to the project to make Piwik what it is today. Visit the Piwik Team page to view profiles.

You can also be part of the Piwik project! We need help to build the best open source web analytics software, and there are many ways to help whether you are a Piwik user, a developer, a marketing fan, a blogger, or if your native language is not English and you want to translate the software. Check out the How to Contribute? page.
How does Piwik track downloads?

On many websites, you want to track when visitors download your brochure, a photo, a software, etc. Piwik automatically track these clicks as Downloads, and reports them under Actions > Downloads.

Piwik will automatically detect a download as a click on a link that ends with one of the following file extensions: 7z, aac, avi, csv, doc, exe, flv, gif, gz, jpe?g, js, mp(3, 4, e?g), mov, pdf, phps, png, ppt, rar, sit, tar, torrent, txt, wma, wmv, xls, xml, zip.

You can also force Piwik to count a click as a download by using a specific CSS class for this link. Check out the section "Force a click on a link to be recorded as a download in Piwik" in the Javascript tagging Guide.
What are Outlinks, Clicks or Unique clicks?

The Piwik report "Pages > Outlinks" shows the list of external URLs that were clicked by your visitors from your website pages. Piwik will track as an "outlink" all clicks on URLs that are not the same domain or subdomain as the website being tracked. For example, if your visitor click on a link to "piwik.org" on your website "example.org", this will be counted as an outlink in the report. If your visitor click on a link to "news.example.org" from your website "example.org/index.html", this will not be counted as an outlink because the link has the the same domain as your website.

For each outlink, Piwik will report the number of clicks, and the number of unique clicks. Unique clicks are the number of unique visitors that clicked to a given domain ; for example, if the same visitor clicked 3 times on the same outlink, it will be reported as 3 clicks and 1 unique click.

Note that Piwik is not able to track Javascript of flash links. Only HTML links are tracked, eg. <a href='http://example.org'>Read more</a>.
Where can I get support?

If you're looking for help, please read the FAQs, the Documentation, or search piwik.org. If you can't find the answer you're looking for, please post a message in the Piwik Forums, where you can get help from the community.

If you need professional support, you can contact one of the official Piwik Consultants or learn more about Piwik Consulting.
Does Piwik track visitors without Javascript? Does Piwik track search engine bots or other robots?

By default, Piwik only tracks visitors with Javascript enabled. See more information about the tracking process, and the ticket related to non-javascript tracking.

If you want to track visitors (or bots) without Javascript, you can add an Image Tracker on your pages.

Advanced users can also use the Advanced Image Tracker or even call the Piwik Tracking API using HTTP. Check out more information on how to use these advanced tracking techniques in the Piwik Tracking API.
Can I use Piwik and Google Analytics / Yahoo! Analytics / WebTrends etc. at the same time?

Yes, you can use any combination of analytics packages at the same time on your pages. The downside is that your pages might take longer to load as each analytics Javascript tracking code will add some delay to the page load. We also recommend putting the Piwik Tracking code first, above other javascript codes, just before the </body>. Read more about the Piwik Javascript Tracking API
How do I pronounce Piwik?

If you're wondering how to say 'Piwik', you can find out by clicking play.