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

Triggering conversions manually


In the last chapter, we learned about changes we could make to Piwik's JavaScript code or the HTML of our web pages to manually trigger page views, link clicks, or download actions. There may be times that you have to do this with your conversions. In fact, many types of goals may have to be manually triggered, because there is just no other way to do it. Some of these cases are:

  • When a visitor submits a contact form

  • When a visitor comments on a blog

  • When a visitor plays an embedded movie

  • When a visitor plays a game

  • When a visitor has stayed on site for a given period of time

In each of these cases, a conversion will never be logged by using any of the standard rules that we set up to trigger a goal. There is no page title to match, no file to download, and no outbound link to click. We will have to trigger the conversion ourselves.

We are going to create a goal now that will be triggered manually, so go back to the Goals tab on Piwik's main menu and we will get...