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

Meeting system requirements


At the time of writing this book, the latest version of Piwik was 1.8; the following are the requirements for this version. A newer version of Piwik may have more or less the same requirements as those covered below.

Firstly, you need to make sure that your server and/or development environment is set up and ready for the install. Fortunately, the requirements of Piwik are not very hard to meet. Most hosting companies' standard PHP and MySQL packages will meet these requirements.

  • First, you need a web server. The most common, Apache, is the standard for most Piwik installations. Piwik also runs well on light web servers like Nginx or lighttpd. In fact, for high traffic websites, a light web server is the recommended option. But if you are a beginner with Piwik or Nginx, it is best to stick with Apache.

  • Piwik requires MySQL version 4.1 or greater to store its analytics data.

  • Piwik also needs PHP version 5.1.3 or higher installed on your web server; version 5.3 or higher is recommended for less memory usage.

  • You will also need to have either the pdo and pdo_mysql extension installed, or the mysqli extension installed. These MySQL extensions can use some of the more advanced features of MySQL 4.1 necessary for Piwik to run.

  • You will also need the PHP GD extension to create the images for some of the graphs in Piwik.

Chances are that a web hosting company will have the required PHP extensions enabled on your account. They are standard on most modern servers. If they do not have it enabled, you can put in a support ticket to have the above requirements met. Editing the php.ini file to enable the correct PHP extensions yourself will be covered in the installation process.