Barry Hand

Piwik is a piece of soft­ware which aims to be an open source alter­na­tive to Google Ana­lyt­ics. The soft­ware is down­loaded and installed online by you, the track­ing code is a sim­ple JavaScript insert.

I’ve been play­ing with it for a few months, and while it’s not on the same level as Google Ana­lyt­ics for usabil­ity, some of the fea­tures make it a real contender.

Because it’s open source and has an open API and allows you to develop your own plu­g­ins, you can check out the live data avail­able here — Piwik Dash­board — Wiffy​.ie

Some of the cool things you can do, is the abil­ity to wid­getise the data, Wouldn’t it be cool to grab the lat­est KPI’s off your web­site all on one page, and drop them in any­where by cre­at­ing your own dash­board. But not just report on those fig­ures, inter­act with them, change their pre­sen­ta­tion (try it below by click­ing the icons to the bot­tom left)

I could see this being par­tic­u­larly use­ful for an intranet web­site where Google Ana­lyt­ics doesn’t work (for most com­pa­nies) but also for those who don’t want their data shared with Google.
For an overview of what Piwik can do, check out the pre­sen­ta­tion below.

So, is it a Google Killer? not yet but it’s cer­tainly get­ting there — the most obvi­ous ben­e­fit of Google Ana­lyt­ics for me is the inte­gra­tion with Google Adwords, but this is becom­ing less of an issue as I’ve moved to third party track­ing, bid man­age­ment and opti­mis­ing services.

What’s great about Piwik?

• Open Source — you are in con­trol of the data
• Open API — very flex­i­ble for developing
• Plu­g­ins — add/remove data — build your own
• Live Data — up to date, see met­rics right now!

Sounds good? Grab the lat­est ver­sion and see for your­self