Rothemund » web analytics

Open Source Web Analytics with Piwik

Holger — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:56:01 +0000

A few weeks ago I was doing some research on web analytics tools. On the search for a open source alternative to the commercial web analytics packages I came across Piwik, which is the successor of PHPmyVisites.

It is still beta and there is still a lot room for improvement, but it works quite well for me and is pretty stable. It looks like a really promising open source alternative to Google Analytics. Google offers its web analytics tool for free, but the data will be stored on their servers and you do not have access to the database. For some it might be interesting to get some data from the database to connect it with other databases, etc.

I will follow the development of Piwik. While the name sound quite weird I see a lot of potential for Piwik. I hope they will get the heatmap tool from PHPmyVisites back into the tool and they really should consider to offer click paths, so that you can see how visitors navigate through your website. It can give you a lot of feedback about the usability of your website, for example.

As soon as I have a little more time I will write a more comprehensive review about Piwik. So far I can only suggest to download the latest version (0.2.3) and give it a try. It is well worth it.

Webanalytics Tools

Holger — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:53:28 +0000

On this website I am currently using two different webanalytics tools. Of course, I use Googles Analytics and I really like the new layout, which gives you a good overview. I read about reinvigorate, a webanalytics tool which is still in beta, on webanalyticsbook.com (why the hell is a search missing on that blog? I had to use Google to find the post about reinvigorate).

I am still testing this new tool and its only 12 days now, but so far I really like it. It is simple and easy to use and the graphs and the display of the figures are nice. I guess for now I will keep both, Google Analytics and Reinvigorate (we will see what happens when Reinvigorate comes out of beta)

Once I have a little more data I might put a few screen shots on this website to show you how Reinvigorate works and displays the data.

New Google Analytics

Holger — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:17:58 +0000

Today when I logged into my Google Analytics account I was informed that Google within the next month all Google Account will be updated.

The tour provided by Google looks very promising and interesting. Google Analytics was always a very interesting Tool for web analytics, but this new interface and the new statistics seem to be a huge step ahead (as far as I could see in the tour).

Unfortunately I still have the old interface, but I am really looking forward to make first tests. You will be able to create your own personalized dashboard, with the statistics and figure you want to see on first glimpse. This will accelerate the daily analysis of your web site traffic. The definition of time slots also seems to be improved.

A very interesting features is the so called "site overlay": it will allow you to see certain information directly on your website, like how many visitors clicked on which link, etc.

Once I have access to the new interface I will give you a better overview.