Piwik as an Alternative for Web Analytics Tool

Piwik layout

Piwik is a free web analytics tool that is highly customizable. It’s free open source real-time web analytics tool. Piwik provides a nice interface and great functionality that is easy to install and use.

Piwik web analytics comes in a small 5.7 mb package that can be install on any traditional web server or host that uses PHP.

This is what the default setup looks like once  Piwik web analytics has been installed and you have logged into the tool for the first time. In this Piwik review, we’re using screenshots pulled from their demo (we’ll post a link to it at the end of this article).

As you can see, the dashboard is made up of a number of widgets which you can remove, minimize or re-add with ease using their Widgets & Dashboard drop down menu. By default, Piwik has the following widget areas enabled, but you can easily add more if you like:

  •     Last Visits Graph
  •     Visitors in Real Time
  •     List of Keywords
  •     Visitor Countries (Map)
  •     Visitor Browsers
  •     Best Search Engines
  •     Visits by Server Time
  •     List of External Websites
  •     Length of Visits
  •     RSS of the Piwik.org Blog

Notable Advantages:

  • Provide a real time web analytics report and no more waiting for the statistics to appear. Since it’s realtime traffic data instantly appear.  You may also set the frequency at which the reports are generated.
  • You own the data generated by Piwik as it is installed on your server and you have full control of the data generated. Therefore, there is no risk of unwanted sharing of your web analytics data
  • A fully customizable dashboard, you can drag and drop widgets you want to display.
  • Plugin support to extend new additional features for Piwik. You can also develop your own plugins to get a custom feature built into Piwik.

Piwik does certainly provide same information (in some form or another) from Google Analytics as well. But Piwik interface is much faster and easier  to understand when it comes to finding something out quickly and easily. Piwik can be considered for quick report and Google Analytics for advance in-depth reports. As piwik can provide a quick insight into site performance, visits and referrers.

If you are looking for a quick, easy to install, real time analytics platform that is both open source and free, look no further than Piwik. You won’t regret it.

Getting Started with Piwik by trying their demo

You may try Piwik demo at http://demo.piwik.org.

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