Piwik vs. Google Analytics
After pondering for a while, I finished installing Piwik as our secondary web reporting / analytics tool.
I’m quite happy with Google Analytics so far, but the fact that you don’t own the data coming from your users on your website (along with some remarks from our lawyer about exporting usage data into the US being not the preferred solution, especially in Germany) was enough to start looking around for other solutions.
Piwik is an downloadable web analytics PHP/MySQL application, that aims to be an open source alternative for Google Analytics. The feature set already is impressive, and can be extended through plugins.
A JavaScript tracking code snippet must be included on all relevant web pages, to enable tracking.
Speaking of plugins – there does not seem to be a whole lot of community provided plugins yet, and the list of available plugins is a bit cumbersome to browse and search (partly because its served by trac).
There is no out-of-the-box support for goals, but you get some extra reports like “Visits by local user time” that have no equivalent in Google Analytics (as far as I know – I’m no GA geek).
The GUI is informative and pretty to look at – but I guess the big thing is the API. You can access the data – your data – in JSON, XML, PHP or CSV format.
As I have no plans for the API so far, I’m most interested in comparing the numbers I get from GA with the ones from Piwik. I will report my findings here soon.
In the meantime, here are some slides giving some more detailed info about Piwik’s structure and features:
Actually I’m wrong – there IS a “Goals” plugin. Will definitely check it out!