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

Defining goals


So what goals are you going to track with Piwik? What do you want your website or business as a whole to do? Identifying your goals helps you define what success is in your business. In fact, the process of defining concrete goals may help you redefine or tweak what you thought were your business goals because it forces you to quantify those goals.

Piwik or any web analytics software cannot track anything that is not quantifiable. If you can't put a number on it, there is no way for a software to analyse it. Having happier customers next month sounds like a great goal in your mind, and may work as a mantra you repeat to yourself every morning, but to be a goal in Piwik, you need numbers. A customer's happiness factor cannot really be measured. But you can count how many orders are completed at your website, so finalized orders are a perfect goal. But this may not be your only goal. If you have a newsletter on your e-commerce site, another goal of yours could be newsletter signups...