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

Chapter 4. Setting Up and Tracking Goals

If you don't have goals for your website to reach, you may be missing out on some of the features that Piwik provides for you. You would be tracking traffic for no real reason. If you have a website without analytics, you have no clue what is driving business to your site. A decade ago, anyone with a niche idea or product could, if he knew what he was doing, launch a website, start selling a product or products, and had a good chance of becoming relatively successful. Now, for any product you are selling at your online store, you can find 20 other stores selling the same thing. Having a dream and a little technical knowledge is not enough anymore. You have to build traffic. And you have to build traffic that converts. In order to even know that traffic is converting, you need an analytics system, such as Piwik, and you need goals for your website to reach. These goals can be as simple as having twice as many visitors next month to your blog, or as...