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Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

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Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#51

Post by alexatkeplar »

asdasf wrote: post #49
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.

In that case, maybe take a look at Snowplow - it's open-source and we have users generating billions of events. https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#52

Post by halfdan »

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…

Full Disclosure: I am a Piwik Dev

Whenever Piwik gets slow you will have to setup cron archiving: http://piwik.org/docs/setup-auto-archiving/

By default, Piwik will aggregate data when you a) make an API request - b) Load the dashboard (which in fact calls the API). Cron archiving makes this process faster by processing all the data beforehand so that the API can simply request it from the DB.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#53

Post by winslow »

moepstar wrote: post #42
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/

I believe he is referring to an event such as a javascript based event when a user clicks a button etc. I'm also interested in event tracking because my WebGL site uses it to track user interaction since users only visit the WebGL view and don't visit multiple pages.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#54

Post by belorn »

For hosting providers (or those nice people who share their servers with friends), you can have Piwik automatically installed by default when creating new sites.

This is impossible to do with GA, as GA require the creation of personal accounts and injection of code into the customers/users website.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#55

Post by X4 »

alexatkeplar wrote: post #48
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 o…

wow! May I ask where you advertised Snowplow so far? I can't believe that I don't know it.

Awesome product, looks a little hard to setup, due to the Hadoop linkage, but definitely worth to be used on my next projects. Maybe worth making a vm appliance, puppet/chef, or docker script for easier deployment.

Why haven't I ever heard of it? I usually "snowplow" the web for all kinds of software, but it appears that I haven't crossed the marketing channels you've targeted.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#56

Post by bpatrianakos »

unknownian wrote: post #46
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.

I'm on iOS and I used a bunch of the GA apps and they all sucked or asked you to pay which I'm not opposed to but its not worth it for me. Maybe things in iOS land have gotten better since I last tried one.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#57

Post by themodelplumber »

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…

> It isn't as pretty as GA. I know this is petty and that its themeable but the UI was important to me.

I explored this too--it turns out that they make money off of the design of custom Piwik UIs for sale. A site license for their white-labeling plugin costs just under 2,000 euro.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#58

Post by rcsorensen »

X4 wrote: post #55
alexatkeplar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

wow! May I ask where you advertised Snowplow so far? I can't believe that I don't know it. Awesome product, looks a little hard to setup, due to the Hadoop linkage, but definitely worth to be used on my next projects. Maybe worth making a vm appliance, puppet/chef, or docker script for easier deployment. Why haven't I ever heard of it? I usually "snowplow" the web for all kinds of software, but it appears that I have…

The setup is pretty annoying. I still haven't figured out what permissions need to be granted to IAM users on AWS to do things like spin up the Hadoop jobs.

Having your granular end up in Redshift, ready to be enriched with other biz data sources is a beautiful, beautiful thing, and completely worth it.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#59

Post by alexatkeplar »

X4 wrote: post #55
alexatkeplar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

wow! May I ask where you advertised Snowplow so far? I can't believe that I don't know it. Awesome product, looks a little hard to setup, due to the Hadoop linkage, but definitely worth to be used on my next projects. Maybe worth making a vm appliance, puppet/chef, or docker script for easier deployment. Why haven't I ever heard of it? I usually "snowplow" the web for all kinds of software, but it appears that I have…

Thanks for the kind words X4! Marketing-wise - we are just growing organically, slowly building the userbase as more people come into contact with what we're offering.

Deployment-wise - it is a bit fiddly to set up. A community member is hopefully going to work on some Opscode Chef and Amazon CloudFormation scripts so that should make it a lot easier.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#60

Post by hayksaakian »

mdasen wrote: post #22
sergiotapia wrote: post #8

One thing I feel you miss out if you don't use GA is 'Google-juice'. Maybe it's just like blowing into a Super Nintendo cartridge, but I think using GA increases your SEO with Google. Am I mistaken?

You're probably mistaken. The reason why this probably isn't true is that it would be a regulator's/anti-trust-buster's dream come true. Imagine it: Google ranks you lower if you don't use other Google products. Don't use GA? Ranked lower. Don't pay for ads? Maybe your organic results drop a bit. . . Google has to be very careful about its organic search results. Giving extra weight to sites that use things like Goog…

This is basically true for Google + already.

Authorship on your sites alters your sites appearance on SERPs thereby giving you a distinct advantage or disadvantage that you can only gain by using Google's product.

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