Piwik 1.0, First Impressions

Piwik, the self-proclaimed alternative to the widely used Google Analytics, released version 1.0 on the sly sometime yesterday. I’ve been keeping an eye on Piwik for the past month or so, watching its trac list for v1.0 slowly being whittled down, and generally have been impatient. So as I surfed my usually gamut of sites this warm Sunday evening, I remembered that Piwik has a habit of getting a lot done on weekend (devs must have day jobs), and so here we are, with Piwik v1.0 discovered and installed. So, first impressions…

The install is very WordPress-like, if you have ever installed that. FTP the piwik files to your server and run their installer in your browser. They do some server checks to make sure everything uploaded correctly (I had to go back and explicitly upload 3 files in binary mode) and to verify that you have php, mysql, etc. They then ask for the database they are going to be creating tables in, and the site you want tracked first. They then spit out a bit of javascript for you to put on the pages you want tracked (I chose this blog as my experiment), and you’re done with the installer. Copy that bit of javascript over to the footer of the site you want tracked and you are completely done. For analytics software, it doesn’t get much easier to install.

On to the dashboard. What can I say? It’s analytics. The first thing you see is a line chart of the visitors for the past months. Also easily visible are charts/tables for the length of visits, browsers used, and keywords. The live stats are my personal favorite. As a test, I clicked on a page on this site, and by the time I tabbed back over to piwik, it had recorded the click (complete with browser, OS, screen res, etc). More importantly, there are a ton of widgets, and you can build your own, to add to the dashboard. Oh, and you can drag them around the page to be wherever you want. Still deciding if it is gimmicky. I think that you can add your own widgets means that it is not. Often, these sort of interfaces mean the design team refused to make hard decisions and opted to pass it off to the user. But since the person is allowed to add their own whatevertheywant to the page, it works. Some of the charts have a feature that allows you to view the data in multiple forms, meaning I never have to see a pie chart again, and isn’t that worth whatever downsides Piwik might have? Of course, it also stinks of the common open source problem of ‘too much choice’. But it is open source, so that is to be expected. And as this is an analytics package with, I suspect, power users as the primary audience, it can even be forgiven. The geek in me certainly doesn’t mind all the buttons.

Since I just installed Piwik in the past hour, I haven’t gotten to all of the other features you might want to try out. But they track all sorts of actions, and you can set goals and whatnot, as you would expect. What I did do was add another website to see how much of a hassle that was. It was actually very simple. A click over to Settings->Websites->Add a Website, and there you type in the site’s info and you’re done. Again, they give you some tracking javascript, which you can get back to at any time, and voilà. What I thought was especially nice is that in the same place you can list excluded ip address and excluded parameters (by default they ignore some common ones, like phpsessid).

I obviously don’t know how any of this scales yet, but there are some things in Piwik that show they have thought about how to scale to large websites. Under general settings, there are options about generating archives and how often you should allow Piwik to do so, complete with recommended settings. For large sites, they recommend setting up a cron job for archiving, which is good, as it shows they understand the limits of the what the software can handle.

There are other advanced options that I have not looked into yet. If you don’t want to use javascript to tracking your site, there is a pixel you can use instead. Note that you can’t track everything with a pixel that you can with javascript. There is also an API in case you need to give your server the ability to trigger conversions. I haven’t looked into how complicated or robust it is, but that it exists at all is hopeful for those of us doing more complex transactions.

And that’s really as far as I have gotten in my looking around Piwik v1.0. If something explodes, I’ll let you all know. At first glance, I’m happy with it. Piwik has an online demo, which uses their site for data, that you can check out. At the end of the day, Piwik is still something you have to install, which will probably keep it behind Google Analytics for the majority of people. But, if you are like me, and have good business reasons to not agree to Google’s awful terms of service, Piwik may just be your open source solution.

Ugh… ‘open source solution’ sounds like some marketing bs, doesn’t it? Next thing you know, I’ll be spouting off about ‘Web 3.0′ or some other gag inducing nonsense. I’m sorry. Go try Piwik.