Anyone who manages their own website knows how important it is to track the traffic coming to their site. There are several solutions out there, Google Analytics being the most well known. I wanted to see what other alternatives were out there.

After a bit of searching, I came across Piwik, an Open Source alternative to Google Analytics. After reading through the Piwik website, I thought I would give it a try.

Installation is very simple. Just upload the files to your webspace, and then access the installation URL. The Piwik installation will firstly perform a system check to make sure your system meets the minimum requirements. Next comes the Database access details. Once the Database is setup, your are then asked to enter the Super User details. Finally you are required to add a website URL to track.

For the tracking to work, you need to add Javascript to each page you want tracked. Tracking covers the standard things like vistors, unique visits, Bounce Rate, Browsers, location and so on. The one feature I really like is that all sections of Piwik are actually plugins. You can easily customise the information you see in Piwik by enabling/disabling the plugins. Expanded functionality in the future will be added via new plugins.

Piwik Dashboard

As this project is Open Source, it’s open to anyone who wishes to contribute. There are already several translations of the project. As Piwik is still in beta (currently at v0.2.33 as of writing this article), there is still a few months of development before v1.0 is reached. However, even at this early stage, I’m finding Piwik to be feature rich and quite stable. Some of the features the developers have planned to implement are:

• multi sites dashboard
• new modular Javascript API
• PDF reports

Piwik looks to be a promising alternative to Google Analytics. The developers have delivered a robust platform that will allow Piwik to grow with user contributions over coming months. Definitely worth taking a look at.

For more information: piwik.org