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

Using other Piwik JavaScript API methods


Here are even more ways you can customize your Piwik JavaScript tracking code.

setRequestMethod(method)

This function will set the request method that Piwik uses to either the GET or POST methods. By default, this is set to GET. In order to set Piwik's request method to POST, your Piwik installation must be on the same server as the tracked website. Just add this function call above the trackPageView call in your tracking code, like so:

...
piwikTracker.setRequestMethod('POST');
piwikTracker.trackPageView();
...

Some hosting providers use mod_security, which blocks requests that contain URLs. In this case, Piwik will not be able to track URLs. If your hosting provider won't relax the settings for your account, one way around this mod_security issue is to set Piwik's request method to POST.

discardHashTag(bool)

By setting this method's Boolean value to true, you can have Piwik disregard hash tags in URLs. Add it before the call to trackPageview, like so...