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

Setting up download and outlink tracking


In the default tracking code given to you by Piwik, download and outlink tracking is enabled by default. This line of the tracking code does it:

...
piwikTracker.enableLinkTracking();
...

The easiest way to disable all download and outlink tracking is to comment out this line of code; like so:

...
//piwikTracker.enableLinkTracking();
...

Disabling link tracking

If you still need to track some links but not all, an easy way to do it is by using CSS classes. Piwik lets you specify which classes of links will not be tracked.

Note

setIgnoreClasses(string|array): This function sets CSS classes to be ignored, if present in the link.

So, if you have a set of links to other sites on a specific page on your site that you want Piwik to ignore, you just have to give them a common CSS class that can be used to tag them. If they have the same CSS class already, and are the only items on the page that do, the current CSS class can be used.

Let's say we created a class...