You Pick: Piwik or Google Analytics

I wanted to compare Google Analytics to another free web analytic software and I found Piwik. Piwik, which is open source, has been noted as a serious contender of Google Analytics, so my interest was piqued. “Piwik has most of the features you’d expect from this kind of service including real-time analytics, visitor maps, goals, campaign tracking, referrer information, and a JavaScript tracking API,” reports online learning platform SitePoint (White, 2014). Check out this quick video summary of Piwik’s features.

Or poke around their interactive demo to learn more.

Right away, you can see that Piwik has really front-loaded their dashboard, offering a lot of information that can be manipulated, moved, and even laid out differently. Drilling down is very user-friendly right from the dashboard. For instance, with Keywords ranked right there on the dashboard (which Google Analytics doesn’t have on their dash), you can click any given keyword value to see the table indicating which search engines the keyword was input.

It seems like a huge oversight that Google, the leader search provider, would not give web administrators readily available access to keyword statistics.

Now, when it comes to some other ease of use issues, Google Analytics still has an upper hand. First of all, Google Analytics is not only free but also highly credible, making it a bit of shoe-in for the novice. Second, if you are a novice, GA’s setup is very streamlined, simple and takes less time to install than Piwik. Just type your site information and GA generates a code for you. It requires very little technical knowledge. However, Piwik is actual software that you have to download, install, and even host on your own server. But Piwik does require a little knowledge of PHP and MySQL, if you are going to make your own custom edits to the software, according to Smashing Hub (Garg, n.d.). Moz blog writer Ben Morel claims it is too difficult for users to get good insight from the data Google Analytics presents, saying, “…Google Analytics is very easy to set up and it’s very easy to see the data it spits out, it’s actually very difficult to get real insight. Almost every valuable analysis requires creating a custom report” (2014).

In that paragraph lies one of the great distinguishers between Piwik and Google Analytics—hosting the data on your own server. With GA, you host your data with Google; they essential “own” your data. According to Internet usage analytics firm Built With, as of the end of 2014 Google Analytics is running on nearly half of the top 1 million websites (Google Analytics usage statistics, n.d.). So with that many users, a number of people and organizations have expressed concern about a single company having access to that much data. Yet, there are some positives to housing your data with Google—barring an apocalypse, Google’s servers are likely to never go down. Or, if they did, they would be back up quickly because, well, because it’s Google… On the other hand, if your organization’s server goes down, how long will it take your IT department to get things back up and running? You would have to think about some real practical issues regarding staffing capacity and whether your company is big enough to handle the maintenance and emergency situations necessary for housing all of your own data. Having control of data may be of great importance for some companies. The local vintage shop? No, not so much. A local school district, with tons of personally identifiable information about minors? Certainly. A hospital with sensitive patient information? Also, yes. The rise of third party and web-based software has made data privacy and security a much-talked-about issue.

Piwik also has a few other features that Google Analytics doesn’t. For example, according to Charu Garg, the “most prominent feature of Piwik is “Server Log Analytics.” Using this feature, you can analyze visitor server log, including service provider, IP address, user agent, referrer URL, search keyword, status, and actions etc. You can filter all traffic from a given IP or IP range, to analyze the overall user experience. You can’t track particular visitor in Google Analytics, as it doesn’t provide this feature” (n.d.). This is a very powerful tool because when coupled with the Transitions Plugin, “you can analyze the things done by your visitors directly before and after viewing a particular page. This feature is quite hard to find in other web analytics tools” (Garg, n.d.). Speaking of transitions, Piwik has had the foresight to all you to export your Google Analytics data into their system should you decide to make the switch to Piwik. Ben Morel, Moz Blog writer goes so far as to say Google Analytics is not the best solution out there. Morel writers, “It’s not even the best free solution out there for some people. But what it is is good enough. It’s good enough to get some profound insights out of if you work with it, and like Excel, even better if you can build a custom dashboard. It’s good enough if you value those insights over privacy. It’s good enough if you can’t invest the time to learn a new tool that will give you similar insights. It’s good enough if you ask it the right sort of questions” (2014).

But GA integrates so seamlessly with Google AdWords… Well, Piwik can track a great number of campaigns as well, by simply using URL parameters. “For example, instead of putting a link to your website such as http://example.org/landing.html in your email newsletter or AdWord destination URL, you would instead put a link to http://example.org/landing.html?pk_campaign=Email-Nov2011. All visitors who open the email and click on the link will arrive on your website. Piwik will track the visit, and detect the parameter “pk_campaign” in the URL of the first page view, and the visit will be credited to the Referrer > Campaign: ‘Email-Nov2011’” (Piwik website, 2014). Therefore, the same way that you would track any campaign other than AdWords in Google Analytics you would do the same procedure in Piwik. So, unless AdWords is the only campaign you ever run, using the URL parameters in Piwik wouldn’t much tax your resources.

vIn conclusion, with Piwik being free and obviously winning over fans, a bit more credibility and awareness could make the free analytics program a serious rival for Google Analytics. With increased concern over security and data ownership, GA may have to step up its game to stay in the game.