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

Adding Piwik e-commerce tracking to ZenCart


You may be able to find a plugin that adds Piwik's e-commerce tracking to the shopping cart software that you use. But often you will be faced with writing your own code for your e-commerce platform. If you know your shopping cart well enough to write custom code for it, it is really not that hard to integrate Piwik tracking and the payoff is worth the work.

We are going to write a plugin for ZenCart. When I was writing this book, I couldn't find a plugin for the ZenCart installation I was using to test Piwik, so I figured we could write one. ZenCart is an open source e-commerce shopping cart that branched from osCommerce in 2003. osCommerce is still the more popular of the two platforms, but I prefer ZenCart for ease of modification.

Although we will be writing a plugin for ZenCart, you can use similar logic when writing custom code for your e-commerce platform. If we look back over the previous code, we can see that we need to find four types of...