Book Image

Piwik Web Analytics Essentials

By : Stephan A. Miller
Book Image

Piwik Web Analytics Essentials

By: Stephan A. Miller

Overview of this book

<p>Without web analytics, you are blind on the internet. In order to improve conversions and revenue on your web- site, you need to know what is going on. Piwik gives you this data and unlike Google Analytics, gives you total control over its usage. Unlike Google analytics where the data can be read by Google, Piwik maintains complete confidentiality of your website data. By harnessing the power of your tracked data, you can raise the conversion rates on your website to new heights.<br /><br />"Piwik Web Analytics Essentials" will show you how to install Piwik Open Source Analytics and have you tracking your website’s visitors within an hour after you pick up the book! After that, you will learn how to track custom events and programmatically trigger tracking events. The book continues with ecommerce tracking and advanced Piwik API usage.<br /><br />This book will take you from installing Piwik on your web server to writing custom tracking code for your apps.<br /><br />You will learn goal and event tracking techniques and how to add them to your standard tracking to fine tune your analytics results. Nothing is untrackable using Piwik: ecommerce shopping carts, web apps, phone apps, and more can make use of Piwik tracking capabilities.<br /><br />"Piwik Web Analytics Essentials" will walk you through every step with detailed screenshots and plenty of example code.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Piwik Web Analytics Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Creating a change log for your website with analytics feedback


I tried to put at least some useful examples in this book, real-world examples instead of toys, though I had to fall back on toys a few times. But when it comes down to dealing with the data side of Piwik, there are some tools I wish I had. Learning about software such as Piwik gives you the ability to take those dreams and make them a reality.

This example is actually a tool I will use. I have been building websites for a long time and tweaking them for the same amount of time to play the cat and mouse game with Google and the other search engines. I always knew it was a good thing to log these changes and then check your stats to see how these changes affected traffic and conversions.

Split testing is the best way to see the true effect the changes will have on your site. But split testing occurs after a visitor enters your site. You run two pages at the same time, sending some visitors to one and some visitors to another....