Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

Crimestoppers (A UK charity) are doing this too, and I wrote them to explain the potential for privacy issues. 'You've outsourced crime victims' privacy to an ad company' was my basic message.

I told both the local police and Crimestoppers how easy Piwik was, and how I thought it was a better idea but I don't think I got my point across. There is a gap in the understanding where the site owner doesn't see the raw data (bot Google does) and so they think it's okay.

Anyhow, interesting privacy issues and it may be that I am overlooking something or being overly cautious.

I posted a related question over on Stack Exchange if anyone's interested in providing some feedback there. http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/q/47069

But another FOSS analytics platform is Snowplow (http://snowplowanalytics.com), and while it wouldn't replace GA for them, it might replace another commercial analytics package. Few high volume ecommerce sites use just GA these days.

However, it tends to behave clunky after some time, depending on the number of sites, traffic and server where you host it. This is most visible when you try to display a larger date range or just dig in the history.

There is one more important thing to consider: it collects IP addresses of all your visitors out of the box, which might be in conflict with your local laws. Be sure to check that out before adding it to the site.

Anyone fancy telling the lot at gov.uk about this? It would be nice if they weren't using foreign owned (and likely foreign-located) servers to record and analyse what UK citizens do on UK government websites.

I am the author of the post Tony is linking at the top of his post, and I also use Piwik, where I saw my article was with 300+ visits instead of the 20+ it gets daily. :)

Piwik is great, and I use it to track visits to a few sites I own, all of them are some 6000 page views per day, so no real traffic.

Because my site is powered by Jekyll, I also use vanilla forums as commenting system, so no Disqus or Intense Debate either :)

Have a nice day, and thanks Tony for the link and credit .

Many of the clients appreciate the increased "privacy". And for applications (internal/public/private) it just makes more sense to me than GA.

My favourite part is that it's doing server-side log analysis for my traffic - not using those JS based widgets.

It's got event tracking (sweet) if you choose to use a JS based tickler to do that kind of thing.

Here's a quick and dirty doc I made about it: http://praxis.edoceo.com/howto/piwik

Am I mistaken?

In Piwik you have the visitors log at a glance, we just match IP/time to the log and BAM - we know where the buyer came from, what pages did they visit and how many time stayed there.

On top of this, our site traffic is hidden from the eyes of Google.

It looks like Google and other analytics players are going to refuse to follow DNT, after a hilariously weak proposal by the DAA was rejected by the W3C committee.

The guide and the mentioned Github repo use Piwik 1.5.1. There are several security issues with this version (perhaps many more): http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-9612/... Latest version is 1.12 - I advise against this "simple" solution to use Piwik. Perhaps there is a github repo with the latest Piwik?

Granted, I miss the days of being able to use tools like Analog but it's so badly out of date and not maintained anymore so I only use it when I need to process raw traffic numbers from a server.

I want to love Piwik, and I do like it a lot, but I do have some problems. Piwik gets slow after a while. This may have to do with the server its running on partly but over time the software will slow down especially if you try to pull out somewhat longer date ranges.

It isn't as pretty as GA. I know this is petty and that its themeable but the UI was important to me. Keeping it up to date and maintaining it was also something that requires vigilance. It isn't hard to update but you have to make sure to check for updates. Sounds simple but you'd be surprised how lazy one can be. Also, integration with Webmaster Tools isn't available which is kind of a bummer.

On the plus side there's very little that GA offers that Piwik doesn't. There's even a great mobile app which GA doesn't yet have to my knowledge. You can monitor multiple sites on different servers using a simple JavaScript snippet just like GA, and it breaks down the data in just about every way you'd want.

In the end, despite really wanting to use Piwik long term I wasn't able to do it. I don't see a problem with using Google Analytics for tracking purposes. Google has the power to abuse the data they collect but I trust them not to. I'm not running a site where visitor privacy is a big priority. If I were running such a site I'd reconsider this position. But from an ethical standpoint if it's somehow not okay for Google to collect tracking data on your visitors (and promise not exploit it) why is it okay for any of us to use Piwik and collect that data ourselves. Google has far more data that can do far more damage but they also have far more resources to put into security than most of us. I can take a pledge not to exploit my user's data but Google does too? I know I can trust myself but my users don't. My users might even prefer that if I were to use analytics software that I use software that comes from Google, a name they know and trust, rather than me, a guy who they know a little bit but doesn't have a reputation that can even remotely compete with Google. To me, that's the more interesting aspect of Piwik. The question of why running your own anaytics software is more ethical than using Google.

Edit: When I said I wasn't running a site that made visitor privacy a priority I was excluding the site I run that actually does make user privacy a huge priority. I'm aware I look like a hypcrite now and I think I might actually spend some time thinking of whether or not to switch over to a self-hosted analytics solution for that site. I'm still not sure that a self-hosted service is preferable in my case but I'm open to the idea.

My product allows users to create and launch their own website. I'd quite like to be able to quickly provide basic statistics for users (alongside Google analytics if they want it).

We run a multi-tenant application so have thousands of sites running from the same codebase, however, each site owner would need it's own statistics. At the moment, we just let users provide their own Google Analytics, but it would be nice to report to Piwik I think and give them their own preconfigured stats area?

IMHO Piwik is a valid open-source alternative to Google Analytics and will erode its application marketplace.

Hope some find it helpful for a quick way to test out and run it for free to see if they like it (I do).

This is impossible to do with GA, as GA require the creation of personal accounts and injection of code into the customers/users website.

The problem is there isn't a single viable GA alternative out there that doesn't cost a fortune.

Clicky and Chartbeat are the only two relatively inexpensive option