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 tracking URLs


One of the things that make a modern web analytics tool handy is the fact that it does just about everything for you, without much intervention. But there are times you may need to set data manually, just like we did for the page name.

If you want, you can override a tracked page's reported URL. Maybe the URL you present to the world has been made pretty with a mod rewrite for SEO's purpose, and the actual query string version of the URL and its parameters is more useful information. Sometimes, the dirty version of a URL will have category information and similar data. If this is necessary, you can do this using:

...
piwikTracker.setCustomUrl('http://mydomain/customurl.php');
piwikTracker.trackPageView();
...

Note

setCustomUrl(string): This function overrides the tracked page's reported URL with the value in the parameter string.

You can override the referrer URL with a similar method.

Note

setReferrerUrl(string): This function overrides the tracked page's reported referrer...