Piwik- Free Real Time Website Analytics Tool [Alternative to Google Analytics]

Piwik is a free and open source web analytics tool that provides in-depth analytical reports including e-commerce, goal and campaigns tracking, email reporting and many more along with a customizable dashboard. Piwik can be used in static website or in CMS including WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.

Of course there is no doubt Google Analytics is the best website analytic tool but Piwik website analytics comes up with even more advanced tools and reports to analyze the traffic and keywords of a website. First let’s have a look at the top features of Piwik Website Analytics then we shall compare Piwik with Google Analytics to come up with a conclusion.

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Top Features of Piwik Website Analytics Tool

Piwik has plenty of features to measure your website traffic, here is the list of most useful features among them-

1. Piwik has an easy to use and highly customizable dashboard, you can drag the panels wherever you wish and add the widgets as per your needs, Piwik dashboard supports 45 languages so you can go through the reports in your own language. It also includes Indian languages.
2. Piwik reports includes- visits over time, real time visitors, incoming keywords, referrer website, visitors browsers, visitors location, entry pages, exit pages, goal tracking, campaign tracking and many more.
3. Piwik supports more than 100 search engines that makes it is easy to optimize your website for different search engines with different keywords.
4. Piwik has an official iOS and Android mobile app that let you see the website statistics whenever you wish on your smartphone or tablet.
5. Piwik can also track file downloads

How to Install Piwik Website Analytics?

Piwik is the self-hosted website analytics service that needs to be installed on the server, installing piwik is pretty similar to wordpress or any other CMS installation, your hosting need to have PHP 5.1.3 or higher and MySQL 4.1 or higher. Here is how to install Piwik in your server to analyze website statistics-

1. First of all download Piwik to your PC and unzip it, you shall get “piwik” folder that contains installation files
2. Create a directory such as “analytics” or “statistics” in your server and upload the Piwik files to newly created folder in server using Filezilla in binary mode
3. Now go through the setup wizard and you will get javascript tracking code which should be added in the footer area of your website.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBLmkxT6n2g&w=600&h=338]
Arvixe hosting comes pre-installed with piwik and you will get more hosting providers pre-installed with Piwik in the near future.

Piwik Vs Google Analytics

Piwik is a self-hosted website analytics tool, unlike Google Analytics you don’t just copy and paste the tracking code in your website but you install it in your server manually so it needs some prior knowledge of installing such services, if you have hosted WordPress or any other CMS before then you will find it easy.

You will have full access over your website statistics while using Piwik website analytics tool, you can use custom variables or create your own plugins to get custom statistic reports using its APIs. It also allows you to import your Google Analytic data in its database.

Website: www.piwik.org