When Google won't do
Google Analytics is perhaps the most popular and, arguably, most comprehensive of the free services available for tracking visits to your website. But if you find it lacking in some ways, or if you just want a backup, there is an open source alternative currently in beta that you might want to try called Piwik.
Here at thriftmac, we have been using Google Analytics, but recently it stopped working for no apparent reason. It looks to be fixed now, but meanwhile all the stats for those days are missing. This reinforced the need for a backup, and this is how we discovered Piwik.
Although it is still in beta, it seems to work quite well. There are tons of stats covering all the main bases such as number of visits, referrals, browser usage and so on. The main disadvantage, aside from not being as comprehensive as Google Analytics, is that you have to set up your own database. It’s actually a simple procedure, but if you don’t know how it can be a bit daunting.
The big advantage is that Piwik is a continuation of a previous open source project called phpMyVisites — so development is active and likely will remain stable for years to come.
Posted Thursday, July 3, 2008 in Open-source
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