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

Functioning of default JavaScript


The code seen previously executes when a page or a frame being tracked loads in a browser. It contains all the logic that Piwik needs to track a visitor.

The first executable line in this code occurs when the variable pkBaseURL is set. The tracking code determines whether the URL currently loaded is SSL or Non-SSL, and creates pkBaseURL —the URL for your Piwik installation—with either a leading http:// or https://. Once the URL to Piwik has been generated, the JavaScript code includes the piwik.js file from your Piwik installation in the loaded page.

After the piwik.js file has been delivered to the visitor's browser, a tracker object is created with the variable name of piwikTracker . This object will be used to track all the actions that this visitor will perform on the site. The Piwik JavaScript function was loaded with the piwik.js file and holds the getTracker function, which creates the tracker object.

Note

Piwik.getTracker(trackerUrl, siteId): This function...