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Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

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Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#61

Post by alexatkeplar »

rcsorensen wrote: post #58
X4 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funnily enough, have been working on that exact setup gripe this afternoon:

https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/IAM-setup

(work in progress ;-)

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#62

Post by ambientwhsiper »

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.

I completely agree with the statement. I love Piwik and we use to monitor a lot of our sites. But I hate the fact that it's LAMP. Archive script runs out of memory at least once a week.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#63

Post by edoceo »

I'm a lover of Piwik; switch out of GA for Piwik across all the domains I operate for myself and for some clients. One install can handle multiple domains/site/accounts/groups

Many of the clients appreciate the increased "privacy". And for applications (internal/public/private) it just makes more sense to me than GA.

My favourite part is that it's doing server-side log analysis for my traffic - not using those JS based widgets.

It's got event tracking (sweet) if you choose to use a JS based tickler to do that kind of thing.

Here's a quick and dirty doc I made about it: http://praxis.edoceo.com/howto/piwik

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#64

Post by __david__ »

winslow wrote: post #53
moepstar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Piwik calls those "goals". You can definitely kick those off from javascript. We run piwik on our web solitaire site (http://greenfelt.net) and kick off goals when users do things like complete a game. The code looks like this:

    if (piwikTracker)
        piwikTracker.trackGoal(2);
My only annoyance is that you have to reference things by numbers and not some nice string that reads well in the code... But it works and it's something you setup once and forget about, so I got over it.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#65

Post by alexlitov »

m_ram wrote: post #44
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...

It also got a massive update last week so now it's not as useless as before.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#66

Post by thomaslutz »

Edit: Nevermind - I just read to the end, Piwik can auto-update to latest 1.12. Missed that when cross-reading and trying it myself while reading.

The guide and the mentioned Github repo use Piwik 1.5.1. There are several security issues with this version (perhaps many more): http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-9612/... Latest version is 1.12 - I advise against this "simple" solution to use Piwik. Perhaps there is a github repo with the latest Piwik?

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#67

Post by Hrundi »

halfdan wrote: post #52
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.

I just want to mention that Cron archiving really does wonders for performance.

I've got a site that is receiving nearly 10,000 daily uniques since Google's last [panda|penguin|whatever] update in May, and while Piwik's performance was not terrible, setting up the cron a few weeks ago made the whole experience very snappy.

Thank you for your work halfdan!

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#68

Post by hsshah »

halfdan wrote: post #52
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.

Apologize for hijacking the thread. I am trying to convince one of my clients to do exactly this. Switch from GA to Piwik for their site which is deployed on Adobe CQ5. I know I can use client side tracking easily (hence my recommendation). However, do you know if there is support for server side CQ5 logs?

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#69

Post by bcRIPster »

I've used Piwik myself for years and swear by it for all of my personal projects or sites where I need full data privacy. It provides all the basic data I need for my clients and then some. Also once it was setup I've found maintenance to be pretty simple. I use it for regular web sites, WordPress sites and MediaWiki installations.

Granted, I miss the days of being able to use tools like Analog but it's so badly out of date and not maintained anymore so I only use it when I need to process raw traffic numbers from a server.

Re: Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

#70

Post by generj »

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…

I want to take this opportunity to praise SnowPlow.

They allow for collection from just about anywhere. Options include Javascript, GIF beacons for email embed, Arduino, and anything else that can send HTTP GET requests.

Snowplow's collection can be performed by Amazon CloudFront, which results in absurdly low latency world-wide, for cheap. I think I estimated around $0.60 per million hits. However, Snowplow is very decoupled, so collection can also occur on NodeJS servers, or anything else that conforms to their spec. In fact, everything is fairly neatly decoupled, so if you think something would run better in [FAVORITE_LANUAGE/PLATFORM] you are free to implement it.

I run Snowplow on my blog, but only run collection for right now. Eventually, when I get around to setting up the rest of Snowplow, I'll be able to crunch the numbers. This is huge - most analytics services require processing and collection to be closely tied.

All that said, Snowplow isn't plug and play like Google Analytics or even Piwik is. You need to be willing to patiently wade through the Snowplow documentation.

Both Piwik and Snowplow emulate Google Analytics too closely. Using the same syntax is silly, and limits their potential. I'm still waiting for an entirely JSON based analytics service.

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