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

Triggering page views manually


There was a time when—on the Internet—a page view was a page view. New content meant a new page. But with JavaScript and Flash, the definition of a page view can be a little bit different. If you have a slide show in Flash, isn't each slide a page? What about AJAX applications that load content in the browser without a reload? A visitor could land on an AJAX enabled site, be there for an hour browsing through content and register only one traditional page view. If you had server-based tracking, you could track each of these AJAX hits to the server. But there are still more advantages to using JavaScript to track visitors. You will get data on screen resolution, browser plugins, and other details not available in server logs. Luckily, you can manually trigger page views with Piwik, but it is up to you to determine what a page view is.

You may even have to trigger a page view when it has nothing to do with Flash or JavaScript. A good SEO practice, to concentrate...