Open source web analytics in action (Piwik 0.6.10)
I am just about to start an Elgg-based collaboration platform (innovatenow.net). It still require some thinking, the whole enterprise obviously begs the question why another one … one answer is the possible demise of free web 2.0 services such as Ning … or just think about the things you better keep under control yourself (managing access rights, layout, installation of helpful add ons, as well as integration with other applications such as web analytics, wikis etc.
Anyway, I was keen to see web analytics (Piwik 0.6.10) in action – the ‘tracking’ is really good, quite similar to what you might know from Google analytics. It’s good to have an inkling of how your website is perceived out there … Even though there isn’t much on the site I could see what information would be useful in the future:
- 120 visits so far
- Visitors clicked around 5.8 times on average (that’s quite high)
- People stayed on average less than 30 secs (no wonder)
- Visitors came to the site because they were looking for “Tim’s friends” and if you Google it yourself then innovatenow.net comes up on the 5th place (which is a high ranking but not very helpful
- One site from Unisanet links to innovatenow.net (that must be my homepage)
- And we got 9 different visitors from the US and 4 from Sweden, the high number of Britons must be a mistake
And you can widgetise most of the information above, which means you can use your access statistics anywhere you like (e.g. the usual hit counter plus)
oboy now I know I am out of my depth…