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

Debugging your tracking code


Now that you are dealing with custom APIs and more programming languages, the complexity of your application can grow and bugs pop up here and there in any software. Just in case your software is not perfect, you may want to know how to debug it.

If you run into more trouble then this short section can handle it. You will find that Piwik.org is a wealth of information on managing your Piwik installation and writing custom applications using Piwik, especially its FAQ section and its forum where there are plenty of other Piwik users willing to help.

All tracking calls to Piwik go through one file, Piwik.php in your Piwik installation directory. To turn on debugging, we will be setting the PIWIK_TRACKER_DEBUG global to true. By default, it is set to false, so you want to open the file up and edit it so it looks like the following:

<?php
/**
 * Piwik - Open source web analytics
 *
 * @link http://piwik.org
 * @license http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.htmlGPLv3...