PiWik - Best Open Source Web Analytics Software

One of my clients has asked me to embed web traffic stats on his website. Generally, I monitor the web traffic using Google analytics or stats script provided by the web hosting. However, these do not allow me to embed the stats on the website. After googling, I found this amazing open source web analytic software, PIWIK, that allow one to embed stats data and charts on the website. The software is a mimic of Google analytic but it is free and open source. PiWik is almost comprehensive as Google analytics. Some of the key features of PiWik are:

Breakdown of search engines used to find the site.
Visitor graphs by day, month and year.
List of keywords used to search on this site. This is very important for Search Engine Optimization. By knowing how the pattern how visitors find this site, one can great improve the search ranking.
Breakdown of the browsers used by visitors.

The installation of PiWik is a bit tricky. I encountered some errors when trying to install PiWik on fatcow web hosting. However, installation of PiWik is smooth and straight forward on hostmonster web hosting. There is some minimum requirements for the installation of PiWik: the PHP version must be 5.0 and above, and the most tricky is that the server needs to support both PDO and PDO_MYSQL extension.

Posted by alfred
Tags: google analytics, keywords, Open Source, PDO, PDO_MYSQL, Piwik, search engine optimization

Comments

9 Responses to “PiWik - Best Open Source Web Analytics Software”

paris @ United Worx web design on October 14th, 2008 3:24 am

Google analytics all the way here i dont think it can be done better
Web Designer on November 23rd, 2008 1:15 am

I saw that Google will be offering a Data Export API to the public in the near future. I wonder if there will be any open source charting tools coming out that would use that API and become a competitor to this code?
Clemens B. on November 30th, 2008 4:51 pm

Sounds good to me as I don´t like that google gets to much power/information. I will give PiWik a try. Thank you for the description.
WebComp Analyst on December 13th, 2008 6:00 am

Good find … I am not sure that I will use it widely in public … some things are best kept private ;o), but worth a look and maybe feature on my own mydomain/statistics pages.
Webshopnews on January 4th, 2009 11:06 pm

PIWIK is a really nice tool for all users that do not want to give all stats to Google. Easy to use and easy to understand. Thumbs up for PIWIK!
George Barr on January 14th, 2009 11:59 pm

I definately like the reporting on keywords couple this with the search engine data and you have a powerful SEO tool.

Thanks for the info.
George
G Barr on January 30th, 2009 10:46 pm

Hi and thanks for the heads up.
I am just going through my own SEO at the moment and PiWik looks very promising. I will certainly load it on my site (invisible to visitors of course).

regards
George
Aweber Alternative on February 4th, 2009 5:47 am

Wow I’m really really impressed by how much information is there in the analytics tool. I used to use big G for stat tracking then switching to Statcounter…

Looks like I’m changing again!
Web Host on February 7th, 2009 3:26 pm

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