Piwik - advantages and disadvantages

    Earlier on a habr there were publications about piwik, for example:
    1. Piwik - A Free Open Source Alternative to Google Analytics
    2. Piwik

    also several other references.

    Everyone writes about the same thing:
    1) Piwik - it is positioned as an open source project (GPL license) runs on php and mysql.
    2) Among its advantages, the creators distinguish: an open API, the ability to write and add plug-ins, a custom look and more, etc.
    3) Mention the statement of the creators of the beer that Piwik is an alternative to Google Analytics.

    If you look at the graph of growth of interest in the word piwik www.google.com/trends?q=piwik, then the outbreak of interest in 2008 and growth throughout the year are obvious.

    image

    Now there has been some lull in growth, but the point is not that, but that such a large number of people cannot be mistaken, piwik deserves to be paid attention to.



    About half a year ago, I downloaded and installed Piwik for personal use, and now I want to share my practical experience - the pros and cons found.

    Pros of a beer:


    1) free, open source, written in php
    what I need

    2) because the beer is installed on your site, developers do not have access to your statistics,
    for someone this item is very important

    3) simple installation
    no more than 5 minutes

    4) statistics can be kept for several of your sites, the counter is easy to install
    And view all your sites in one place, It’s also very convenient to switch to viewing the next site.
    In addition, there is a plugin for viewing on one page trimmed statistics for all sites at once, of course with the transition to detailed information.

    5) easy installation of informers on the main page of the beer
    Only a few clicks.

    6) a sufficient number of varieties of informers

    • schedule number of visitors by days, months, years
    • length of visits by time spent on the site
    • country visitors
    • browsers
    • keyword list
    • list of external sites (from where the user came to your site)
    • pages - which page of your site has been viewed many times
    • search engines
    • server time visits

    there are still other informers, but these are enough for me

    7) really high-quality api
    I used the truth only once. It was necessary to programmatically add sites to the statistics system, it took 5 minutes to find out how to do this.

    Despite all the pros of the beer, there are also disadvantages, this is not surprising, the product is actively developing.

    Cons of a beer:


    1) For example, the “Visitor's Country” informer.
    Surely any person would expect to see figures for countries calculated on the basis of IP addresses here.
    But as it turned out, the calculation is based on the included keyboard layout, in my opinion it is not very correct, but some will probably consider this a feature.

    2) Continuing to dig up the topic of countries, I found on their forum how to install GeoIP , a third-party developer did this functionality, installed everything was gut, but after the update it stopped working. It is a pity that GeoIP is not integrated by default.

    3) Informers are located on the page in 3 columns, some informers simply do not fit in the allotted width and you can’t see the entire informer in any way

    4) Informer “Keyword List” sometimes words or some letters are distorted in krakozyabra , always observed in Kazakh and sometimes in Russian

    5) Informer search engines. Almost perfect, but it works poorly with Rambler , if you click on the link you will be taken to the rambler page where the request is entered in a different encoding.

    6) The Live Visitors (Alpha) informer, according to the authors' idea, should update ajax information about visitors who have just come in , so sometimes there are problems with cleaning the list and the list of the same visitors is inserted into the large sheet several times. I had to disable this informer.

    7) In all list informers, if the list element contains a hidden add. info sometimes there is a glitch, add. info of other list items.
    For example, we open Google requests, and Yandex requests are shown to us.

    Despite all the shortcomings, I really like Piwik, I’m sure that with each new version of the glitches there will be less and less, and after a year or two there will be no minuses.

    http://piwik.org/ - official site of the beer project

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