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Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

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Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#41

Post by g-garron »

Hi, realized about this post here in HN thanks to Piwik.

I am the author of the post Tony is linking at the top of his post, and I also use Piwik, where I saw my article was with 300+ visits instead of the 20+ it gets daily. :)

Piwik is great, and I use it to track visits to a few sites I own, all of them are some 6000 page views per day, so no real traffic.

Because my site is powered by Jekyll, I also use vanilla forums as commenting system, so no Disqus or Intense Debate either :)

Have a nice day, and thanks Tony for the link and credit .

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#42

Post by moepstar »

felxh wrote: post #19

Unfortunately it looks like it doesn't support event tracking at the moment. Does anybody know more about that?

If i don't completely misunderstood you, there's Goal and Campaign tracking, see their docs about that:

http://piwik.org/docs/tracking-campaigns/

http://piwik.org/docs/tracking-goals-web-analytics/

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#43

Post by moepstar »

nodefortytwo wrote: post #39

Piwik is great until you get a decent amount of traffic, I had it on a client site as an experiment. at 100k page views per hour Piwik nuked the server :(

Did you / your client set it up as recommended for high-traffic sites?

http://piwik.org/docs/optimize/

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#44

Post by m_ram »

bpatrianakos wrote: post #32

I've used Piwik for years and it is incredibly simple to use and set up but this post makes it much more complex than it needs to be. In all honesty, it's just as simple as setting up Wordpress. Drop the Piwik folder on a server somewhere, run the installation (connecting to your database and if I recall correctly you don't need to use the root user, just a user with sufficient privileges), and you're done. I want to…

Google Analytics does have an Android app now [1]. I think it's been added within the last year.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#45

Post by liquidcool »

My clients are already using Google Webmaster Tools and Adwords and want everything integrated, plus they want the reliability of Google.

But another FOSS analytics platform is Snowplow (http://snowplowanalytics.com), and while it wouldn't replace GA for them, it might replace another commercial analytics package. Few high volume ecommerce sites use just GA these days.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#46

Post by unknownian »

bpatrianakos wrote: post #32

I've used Piwik for years and it is incredibly simple to use and set up but this post makes it much more complex than it needs to be. In all honesty, it's just as simple as setting up Wordpress. Drop the Piwik folder on a server somewhere, run the installation (connecting to your database and if I recall correctly you don't need to use the root user, just a user with sufficient privileges), and you're done. I want to…

>There's even a great mobile app which GA doesn't yet have to my knowledge.

I use Piwik, but GAnalytics has a billion mobile apps.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#47

Post by handzhiev »

Piwik is great and so much better than Analytics. It works especially well for us when we want to track sources of sales, as sales are handled by 3rd party reseller and Analytics goals are of no use.

In Piwik you have the visitors log at a glance, we just match IP/time to the log and BAM - we know where the buyer came from, what pages did they visit and how many time stayed there.

On top of this, our site traffic is hidden from the eyes of Google.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#48

Post by alexatkeplar »

liquidcool wrote: post #45

My clients are already using Google Webmaster Tools and Adwords and want everything integrated, plus they want the reliability of Google. But another FOSS analytics platform is Snowplow ( http://snowplowanalytics.com ), and while it wouldn't replace GA for them, it might replace another commercial analytics package. Few high volume ecommerce sites use just GA these days.

Snowplow co-founder here. Thanks for mentioning us liquidcool :-)

Snowplow is a little different from Piwik - Piwik is a LAMP-stack opensource app which replicates a GA-style analytics experience.

Snowplow is more of a scalable event analytics platform - it is built on AWS (CloudFront, Elastic MapReduce, Redshift), does _not_ have a UI but has a very clean & simple event model[1] and scales horizontally to billions of events.

To date, Snowplow is mostly used by web companies that want to warehouse their granular event data to build custom analyses, segment users, personalize sites etc.

If anybody has any questions, just shout!

[1] https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/blob/master/4-storage/r...

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#49

Post by asdasf »

lazyjones wrote: post #28

Our attempts to install and use Piwik have always been disappointing in the past. It seems to fall apart (slow display etc.) quickly for medium to high traffic sites (50+ million page views/month). Are there any people here who are using it successfully at this order of magnitude and are willing to share some configuration hints?

We gave up on it for the same reason. It is absurd for a simple web analytics app to require massively more powerful hardware than our actual app does. And since it is a mysql mess, any updates that touch the schema put your stats offline for hours. I really can't fathom how using mysql is still considered acceptable in 2013.
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