For a very long time I have been using Google Analytics to track the stats of my web sites. It has a nice looking interface, presents data in an easy-to-read format, and provides a central location to view data from all of my sites. More importantly, it is free.
However, after hearing so many people got banned on their Google Adwords account, and mass-deindexed of all their sites, I have a growing concern that with all my sites listed in a single Google Analytics account, it’s just too easy for Google to de-index all of them if they see something they don’t like on one of the sites.
So I started to look for an alternative to Google Analytics. The statistic tools like Awstats that come with my web hosting is just not good enough. Plus, it’s not practical to having to log into each site individually every time I want to look at the stats.
Other free tools like StatCounter has a really ugly user interface and I don’t think I want to go with paid tools like Clicky.
After some searching I finally found Piwik that I really like. It’s open source which means it’s free and you won’t have to worry about ongoing updates and bug fixes.
It has a clean and nice-looking interface just like Google Analytics and provides pretty much the same functionality. It is self-hosted so you don’t have to worry about your data going through a third-party company.
Installing Piwik is easy. Just upload the files to your server and follow the on screen instruction.
One thing I found that wasn’t clear (or maybe I miss-read the instruction) is Piwik does not create a database for you automatically (it would need to know the username and password of your hosting account to do that) so you need to create a database before installing Piwik. Then just enter the database info during the installation process.
Once installed, you can then add web sites you want to analyze from Piwik’s Dashboard.
The last thing you need to do is copy the tracking script that Piwik gives you and paste it to the pages of your site. If you are using a Content Management System like WordPress, there are plugins available which makes adding Piwik tracking super easy. If you don’t want to use plugins, your theme usually has an option to paste in the tracking script. If not, then modify footer.php and place the script just before the </body> tag.
So check out Piwik. I am sure you will like it.
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I must admit I like the look of the dashboard on PIWIk but found the server installation and database creation a little confusing. I really like the ease of Clicky but it is really expensive. Do you know of anybody who has created a screencast of the PIWIK install process?
Not I aware of, but Piwik.org has step by step installation instructions with screen shots which should be helpful. You may be able to get your hosting company to help if you are not comfortable creating a database yourself.