Piwik as an open source alternative for serious web analytics

If open source is your thing and you publish web sites, Piwik might just be exactly what you were waiting for performing serious web analytics regarding your flow of online visitors.

Used intelligently, web analytics lets mere mortals extract decisive data which, in turn, helps shape the online experience the way visitors appear to want it to be.

To this day, the most vocal users of web analytics have been e-commerce operators but all flavors of web site operator are likely to learn useful things regarding their “analyticized” visitors, such as…

• how they found you;
• when they visited;
• what page they looked at;
• what they bought (or downloaded).

…as well as a wildly varied mix of all these things, within specific timeframes — for all useful purposes, it’s essentially limitless and smart managers can (more easily) stay on top of things if they have a superior understanding of what makes visitors “click” (call it 21st century “deep” data mining).

Even though Google Analytics does an amazing job at helping web publishers understand -and- improve their web sites (for free), open source enthusiasts have been waiting for an alternative like Piwik which can be used under the popular GPL License.

Piwik is the next logical step for phpMyVisites which is still being developed as more of a “general web statistics” engine, with less insistence on web analytics than Piwik which is still its infance, so to speak. Here are a few “static graphs” to give you a better feel for the script…

This PHP / MySQL script installs itself like a breeze and lets you concentrate on your task. Piwik may still be released under beta-labeled versions but it feels much more mature. The administrative interface is zippy and surprisingly customizable for whoever dares mingle with the templates.

It should also be said that if you use Piwik to monitor your web sites, you’ll own 100% of the data generated -and- you’ll be the only one, in the world, with access to it. For many privacy conscious web publishers, this is a major argument for switching to Piwik.

For the more adventurous coders (among us), it’s possible to develop your own plugins so your data will be handled exactly the way you want it to be. This highly modular plugin architecture clearly sets Piwik apart from the competition.

In the event you need to export data from your MySQL database, you’ll be thrilled with the open APIs that let you publish the data in many formats such as xml, json, php and csv.

If you blog a lot, the fact that you can easily embed your “live graph” stats will probably come in handy. The graphics look awesome and they have a definite 2.0 feel to them.

Again, it’s a free download and with a GPL License, you can’t go wrong!

Tags: piwik, phpmyvisites, analytics, web analytics, open source, open source analytics, gpl web analytics, free web analytics, php web analytics, mysql web analytics, data mining, e-commerce, e-intelligence, web 2.0, data formats, web publishing