Piwik - Open Source Web Analytics, first look and review
For a long time, i’ve been itching to install and test Piwik - an open source alternative to Google Analytics, and finally got a chance to do so last week.
Some thoughts into why open source analytics
A major reason why I was leaning towards open source analytics was because, I couldn’t find any reason to trust my data as well as client data with Google, Omniture or any other third party for that matter.
Building your own analytics solution, could be a temporary fix but it could never be a real permanent and stable solution.
An open source web analytics program seemed like a great thing to implement and test.
The Analytics Industry
The Analytics industry is by far dominated by players like Google’s Free Analytics solution, Omniture, Webtrends and others.
Most of these tools are either paid or have other silver linings to them, nothing is completely tool and you could never be sure your very critical data is in safe hands.
Something like Piwik could completely change the dynamics of this industry, just like Joomla and Drupal did with the Content Management System industry.
What Piwik really means more than the fact that its free to use and your data’s secure, is that a lot of new features could be potentially added into this because open source products are known to have a great development base and additional feature developments.
A peek into Piwik
If you’re ultra curious, Piwik offers a free demo here, but you will never know how it performs until you actually test it on one of your own sites.
I went ahead and installed the software in our server, and the entire procedure was pretty painless, taking just under 30 minutes.
Once installed, Piwik gives you a code to insert on sites just above the </body> tag, almost like every other analytics program out there.
In terms of features, an interesting thing I could notice was that Piwik had a whole section dedicated to addons, something which you will not see in many other analytics programs.
Weird enough, this addon / plugin section reminded me of Wordpress’ plugin engine.
This to me, is the most interesting part of the system and could lead to a lot of people switching over.
Once the code was installed, I could see that Piwik was able to start gathering data within an hour, and was showing me stats from a site on which It was installed.
The solution has a very interesting dashboard, where you can add, re-arrange and drop widgets.
The overall traffic monitoring is stable, but not very colorful like Google Analytics or Omniture.
The solution was pretty fast and responsive, which I primarily attribute to its PHP Codebase powered by a MySQL database.
Piwik v/s Google Analytics
A major reason why I installed Piwik on a site is to primarily compare the data that Piwik would throw forward and what Google Analytics would throw forward.
Here’s what Piwik and Google Analytics report on overall traffic stats for the same site over a 24 hour window:
As you can see there are some discrepancies in the data on overall traffic, and this widens further when you check the refferal sources and search engine traffic keywords:
This goes on to prove that there could be something wrong with the data reporting of either of the tools.
There is no possibility of a code insertion error on any page, since the site runs on the Wordpress platform and both codes have been inserted next to each other in the footer.php document.
Some features I would like to see in Piwik
1. A better user interface
Even though Piwik has a decent interface, it has a lot of room for improvement in comparison to Google Analytics at least.
I don’t see this as a major issue, but it could be a problem especially in the long run when the solution is promoted further.
2. Better referral tracking
Even though Piwik has this feature, it still doesn’t cut it in terms of referral tracking, and there is some major work to be done in this aspect.
Search Engine Keyword traffic tracking doesn’t seem to be very sharp either, since it doesn’t seem to count visitors who stick on an entry page for <5 seconds.
3. Better Support Forums and Community
This could be partially blamed to the fact that there are not many users for this program yet, and its still early days.
But, as I see it, there isn’t strong community involvement in the Piwik program.
The best way out for the developers is to model the Piwik community along the same lines as that of the Wordpress community, with forum integration as well as plugin databases.
This could go killer if there was enough community involvement.
Ending Notes
Overall, Piwik’s a great option to keep your data secure, but if you’re really looking at advanced data manipulation, you’re better off using Google or Omniture.
Piwik is one cut better than Awstats and provides a single login interface where you can check stats along with a basic GUI.
But, this in my opinion is temporary, if Piwik is getting as much attention as it is right now.
With stronger developer initiative and user contribution, Piwik could easily outpace Google Analytics and other competition.
comments
Leave a Reply