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

Customizing the dashboard


Just about anything you can think of with Piwik is customizable in Piwik, from how you track your site, to the widgets in the dashboard. Now it's time to start customizing your Piwik installation to your liking. Let's start with the dashboard layout.

Changing the dashboard layout

When you browse to a default installation of Piwik, the widgets are laid out in three equal columns. But you don't have to keep the dashboard this way if you don't want to. To the left side of the widget area, right next to the Date range block, you will see a button that says Widgets & Dashboard. Clicking that button will bring up a menu as shown in the following screenshot:

Under the Manage dashboard sub-heading, click that link if you want to make changes to the layout. When you do, the following lightbox pop-up will appear:

As you see, you can set up the widget layout in just about any configuration you want with one to four columns and with equal or unequal column widths. Just choose...