Do you know who visits your website? How many visitors you get? On which pages they arrive and leave? How long they stay? You should know the answer to all these questions. Your webhost analytics will give you some data. If you have C Panel (very popular webhost interface), webalizer is provided as standard. But, 3rd party analytics programs will give you much more information.
Google Analytics is free and it’s an excellent program, but choice is good. Sourceforge is the world’s largest open source software development website with more than 230,000 software projects. And they recently featured, as project of the month, a website analytics program called Piwick. Piwik provides you with detailed real-time reports on your website visitors including the search engines and keywords they used, the most popular pages and much more.
Piwik aims to be the open source alternative to google analytics. You host piwick on your own server. The installation process is very simple and piwick is easy to use. But because it’s on your server, you are in control. You can add features and functions with plugins. It uses PHP programming language and MySQL, so it’s standards-based, and it’s been downloaded 100,000 times already. So, it’s popular.
Piwick is unique because it’s features are built into plugins, you store your analytics data on your own server, it’s fully customisable and it provides real-time reports. There is an online demo and you could have it setup up in just 5 minutes. You can track almost anything these days, which is good news for webmasters.
Marc Lindsay gives 7 reasons why your website needs piwick. You own the data. Just like wordpress, it has a fully-expandable feature set. It has API (Application Programming Interface) developer access. It has real-time tracking. Total privacy. It’s free. It will make you more money. That last one grabbed your attention, didn’t it? Well, it’s true if you use the data you collect to improve, say, your conversion rates for an ecommerce website.
Web analytics matter if you want to grow and develop your website.
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