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

Tracking shopping carts and items in them


Tracking shopping cart updates in your e-commerce website will allow you to track shopping cart abandonment. Customers may leave your website before checking out for many reasons. Maybe your shipping charge is too high. Maybe your checkout forms are too complicated and you need to streamline them a bit. Maybe the customer is actually saving the cart for later. Whatever the reason, by having access to stats on lost sales, you can work to minimize the amount of shopping carts that are abandoned by making changes to your site and tracking the effect it has on your abandoned carts.

There are two Piwik functions you will be using to track your shopping carts. They are as follows:

  • addEcommerceItem(productSKU, productName, productCategory, price, quantity): This is the same function we use to add items to an order that we discussed in the section before this. The only required parameter is the product SKU. The rest of the parameters are optional. The product...