One our largest service gaps has been the inability to easily share page-specific stats with our content providers. For years now, the web server logs have been fed into a database so logs can be purged. So we’ve had the data, tons of it, but the problem has been just that… too much data and the lack of an interface to the data. Recently, Alex Chernikov built a robust front-end interface for the stats database but the current state of the database would still require lots time and server resources to produce the reports. We’ll likely revisit this solution down the road because it has great potential. But we need stats now, especially with the redesign…
Immediately, we started looking to Google Analytics. It’s widely used and even embedded in some of our current CMS pages. There were a few problems that were apparent from the start…
- Unlike so many of Google’s solutions, there’s currently no API provided so our only option would likely be to use a shared login into the GA site itself
- Reading the GA Terms of Service agreement can give anyone with a high-traffic site an uneasy feeling. Specifically #2 FEES AND SERVICES that says service is provided free up to 5 million pageviews per month. We’re not there but it’s certainly not out of range either.
- Third party content/cookies can be blocked so there’s probably some population that wouldn’t be accounted for in the stats. I’m not sure how big that population is at this point but personally I would expect it to grow as new browsers and plug-in provide additional privacy features.
I’m hopeful that we have found our solution in an open source project called “Piwik“. Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It’s main selling points are:
- Open API
- Plug in architecture
- Data abstraction layer
- Customizable dashboard
The plan is to embed the piwik code in every page we publish and use the “Custom Tab” feature of the Ingeniux CMS to display real-time stats for each page or group of pages.
Because Piwik has an open API and we can house the application and data locally, we should have lots of options for customization and further development. We have Piwik installed and we’ve done some preliminary testing. So far we are quite pleased with the results. When we have the custom tab developed a bit further I’ll post some screen shots here. We would really like to hear any thoughts you might have on this solution. If you have any other solutions in mind that might work for us, don’t hesitate to comment and we’ll take a look.
This sounds like it could have a lot of potential for us!
What kinds of analytics data will Piwik offer users? What can they expect to learn from the stats?
If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, then most of the analytics provided by Piwik will look familiar. It has page hits, unique visitors, visit lengths, outlinks, visit time trends, keywords, frequency/loyalty stats, referrer data (including partners and campaign data) and more.
Piwik, like other analytics solutions I have tested, is really geared toward analytics for the site as a whole and not necessarily individual pages of the site. So initially we will be providing page stats on the custom tab that include page hits and unique visitors over the user selected time period (day, week, month, year and possibly a date range). The view and data will look similar to what you would see on Google Analytics individual page view including a flash chart/graph that shows visitor trends. Since we will own our own data we’ll have the opportunity to provide users with more page-specific analytics in the future. Realistically, we probably won’t be able to tackle the enhanced page-specific analytics until after the redesign.