Once you are aware of the many benefits and features Google Analytics has to offer, you may have determined that Google Analytics is not the best fit for you, citing privacy and data-retention concerns, as well as the problems associated with it being of proprietary nature. There is available free tracking software that addresses these concerns called Piwik.
What is Piwik?
Piwik is a GPL licensed, open source tracking software that provides reports similar to those offered by Google Analytics. In fact, one of its aims is to be an alternative to Google Analytics. Although the software is not yet on feature-parity with Google Analytics, progress is steadily being made and the software is stable enough to get usable results. You will be able to track where your web traffic is coming from and it helps you evaluate how your search engine optimisation efforts are progressing.
Uploading Piwik
Piwik is a self-hosted solution. What does this mean? It means that you need to have access to your own web server files in order to install it. It also means that certain webhosts that do not give file access to your website such as companies that offer free website hosting, or those that enable you to design your pages through click and drag, are not suitable for Piwik.
You will need:
• PHP software (at least version 5.3.1 or above)
• MySQL (at least version 4.1 or above)
• PHP extensions pdo and pdo_mysql
As mentioned, you will also need access to your website files either through FTP or through a shell, as well as clients for accessing FTP.
You should then download the latest release of Piwik from their website and unzip this downloaded file on your hard disk. Upload these files into your web server. Alternatively, if you have shell access on the web server, you may just download and unzip the installation files on the server directly.
You will know that Piwik has been uploaded properly if it shows the Piwik welcome screen when you attempt to navigate to the installed location using your browser.
Installing Piwik
Once you get to the welcome screen, you will be able to start the actual installation process. The welcome screen mentions that installation will only take about five minutes, however in most cases it will take a lot less than that. It really depends on whether you actually have satisfied the minimum requirements beforehand. Installation will take a lot longer if you need to install updated PHP packages and dependencies.
In order to help you see if your server meets the minimum requirements, a system check will be done. The correct versions of PHP, MySQL, pdo modules, and other requirements will be investigated. If Piwik does not find a suitable version of a dependency or cannot find the dependency at all because it is missing, you will see an ‘x’ mark just beside that dependency. You will need to manually correct the situation at this point. Piwik cannot help you install these dependencies.
Piwik will then create your MySQL database and will ask you for the database login and password. On most webhosts you are provided with this information on your accounts page. Otherwise, you may need to contact the web administrator to find out the access credentials you need. On the other hand, if you are managing your own web host, you will need to setup the MySQL account yourself.
Once Piwik can reliably access your database, tables will be created in that database. For this step, all you would need to do is click next. Should there be any problems creating the tables (e.g. the login credentials you supplied does not provide for table dropping and creation) you will be notified and you will need to fix that problem first.
At this point you are almost done. Piwik will finally ask you for a super user name and password. The super user account can only be created once during an entire Piwik installation. This is the only time you can make it. A super user can create and delete website profiles, add and remove users, enable and disable plug-ins and other administrative tasks. Do not forget the super user account information. If you forget, there will be no way to manage you Piwik installation afterwards.
Configuring Piwik
Once Piwik is properly installed, you will need to configure your website profiles. Type in the identifying name and URL of your website. If you have other websites you want to track, you can add a profile for each of them.
After adding a website profile, you will be presented with some java script code, not entirely unlike what you would get if you had used Google Analytics. You may refer to the Google Analytics articles for more information on suggested locations for the java script code snippet, but to recap, the best place to put this snippet of code is just before the </body> tag in your page. Also, make sure that all of the pages you want to track contain the proper snippet as given in the profile that you set up.
Conclusion
Beyond the installation and configuring steps, Piwik and Google Analytics are very similar to each other. Both have features that allow you to gather and analyze visitor data, as well as generate reports to spot trends and monitor visitor activity on your site.
In summary, the primary advantage of Piwik over Google Analytics and other proprietary tracking software is that it is under your control. You are hosting Piwik on your own server, and will have complete control over what data it collects and what it retains.
This amount of control has its drawbacks, primarily being the amount of time needed to procure your own server, install Piwik itself and configure it. Beyond this point however, the advantages of flexibility and malleability far outweigh the ease or difficulty of initial setup.
You may try a Piwik demo for free so that you can see how its features compare to other similar services. Note also that since Piwik arrived a bit later in the game, some of its analysis features may still be lagging behind that of Google Analytics. However, being an open source project, development progress is steadily ongoing and you can expect to see more feature-parity in the coming months.
