I love PIWIK!

So, here is the best solution to track your visitors without leaving to much footprints.

What is PIWIK?

PIWIK is a web analtiycs tool similar to google analytics. Google analytics is great and i used it a long time. But i don't want to give my data to google. If one of my websites gets under manual review, they can see all my other websites too, because of my google analytics ID. So if you have one blackhatsite, they maybe look if your other websites are blackhat too and that can affect your rankings for all sites under this account. They are very good at collecting data, ip adresses etc. and i don't want to share it with them.

So i searched a long time for a replacement, there are many wordpress plugins but they are not as good as google analytics and i wasn't satisfied with the data.

The solution: PIWIK. You can see your unique visitors, you can see what keyword they entered into google to find your site and the best you can see the position of your keyword in google when a visitor comes to your site. So if you have much traffic you can see ranking changes of your keywords immediately. You can see if they used google.com or google.co.uk, you can see the IP, you can see the user agents and many more. And you can camouflage the last digits of your visitor ip's (this is necessary in some countries).

The installation was very easy. I have a cPanel Account and i can install PIWIK with softaculous.

The only thing to remember: PIWIK leaves a footprint in the source code of your website, so it could be possible to track all your sites if you add them to one PIWIK installation. I don't know if it's possible to search html code with google but to be on the safe site, make one PIWIK installation for every site or every niche you have. Split it up and don't put all eggs into one basket.

I would never add all my sites to a google service. Then you make it easy for google to track your sites. Choose the privacy option if you buy domains, use different webspace provider or seohost IP's, use different templates and your network should be safe

Yeah I'm going to install this to instead of GA. Thanks for the tips on the account being showed in the sourcecode.

I couldn't make it work even followed the installation guide.

Wow it's a PR 8 authority website. How did I missed PIWIK
Thanks for the open source script
For you guys who are thinking what it is all about, here is a live demo

In depth referrer, visitor, traffic details.

Edit: Entry pages, exit pages, outlinks, downloads so many freebies.

Yes, at first i had the same problem. Check if you meet the requirements here:

http://piwik.org/docs/requirements/

And ask your hosting provider to enable them. My hosting provider enabled the PHP extension pdo and then the installation was successfull. It's absolutely worth the effort

Finally someone is referring to this great solution !!!

I have 2 installations of piwik with almost 200 sites running so smooth !!

great email/pdf/html reporting , coolest widgets ever , includes an android app (!)
and this week they released the new version 1.5 that has many improvements like Js+canvas graphs (faster than flash) , ecommerce analytics and custom variables monitoring .

BTW - if you're looking to set it up fast and without a burden you can find a hosted piwik solution in piwik*org/hosting/ for a reasonable price.


PIWIK RULES ! :rock:

I missed this as well. Thanks for letting me know about Piwik. I'm starting to love it as well.

Here's a great plugin I just discovered to monitor adsense earnings with PIWIK

dev*piwik*org/trac/ticket/2289

Enjoy

We'll this is awesome, Bye bye Google analytics

Piwik is awesome. I've been using it for ages. There's also an Android app to give you remote access to your data.

Only after you use it you understand how retarded Google analytics is.
Especially if you are a PPC freak and obsessed @ knowing everything.

Install 1 piwik for all sites, don't be crazy it does take resources.

Just installed Piwik, thanks to this thread.

FYI, if you are using Softaculous, Piwik should be available there for a quick install.

In addition, you can find Piwik plugins for use in Wordpress.

Saw Piwik a few months back when I was posting spam for backlinks. Lol. I remember I promised myself to go back and check it out when I finished my linking. Thanks for reminding me, you got me with the seeing keyword position bit.

ron.ray said:

BTW - if you're looking to set it up fast and without a burden you can find a hosted piwik solution in piwik*org/hosting/ for a reasonable price.

Click to expand...

Incidentally enough this also navigates around the footprint issue as well, because obviously the hosting is being done on the same server for thousands of customer sites, so not all will be linked.

Either that or there is an official solution being developed here http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/2019#comment:5 which is the official dev site

I agree: Piwik is even better than GA!

I like HaveAmint. Costs some money but you can get it for free other ways. It's a great app.

Yeah its great. It does consumes a bit server resource but better buy a shared hosting elsewhere (mine on Hostwinds) and use it on it. And you have a good tracking solution for a couple of bucks a month.

EDIT: Just an advice. If you want to use PIWIK on large number of websites then better buy multiple shared hostings from different companies and use multiple installations of PIWIK off those servers as the tracking js code leaves a big footprint (the url where piwik is hosted).

Hello thanks for this thread. I have all on GA at moment.
How are the chances G -1 me or something, if i delete all GA accounts,
and switch to PIWIK? Should i take care, and slowly, one page by one ?

Piwik is great. Using it sofar 3 years.

But: google analytics resultes differ from google analytics. So I use both.

I guess it's better to rank on google using google analytics. More data to big G analyze....

Anyone know how to load it asynchronously? Seems like the next logical step.