Jul

7

PiWik - Best Open Source Web Analytics Software

Filed Under Open Source |  

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.

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    Posted by alfred
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    Comments

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

    1. paris @ United Worx web designNo Gravatar on October 14th, 2008 3:24 am

      Google analytics all the way here :) i dont think it can be done better :)

    2. Web DesignerNo Gravatar 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?

    3. Clemens B.No Gravatar 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.

    4. WebComp AnalystNo Gravatar 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.

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