Piwik

# open source web analytics

http://piwik.org/

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How to measure the performance of a newsletter (or any email) with Matomo

19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft
To be able to grow your business, it is crucial to track all your marketing efforts. This includes all newsletters and emails that you share with people outside of your business. Otherwise, you won’t be able to know which of your daily efforts are yielding results.

Are you wondering if it is possible to track the performance of an emailing campaign in Matomo (Piwik) efficiently? Would you like to know if it is technically easy? No worries, here is a “How to” tutorial showing you how easily you can track an emailing in Matomo properly.

Different tracking levels for different needs

There are many things that you may be interested to track, for example:
Let’s have a look at each of these levels.

Step 1 – Tracking email and newsletter openings in Matomo

Tracking email openings requires to add an HTML code to your newsletter. It works through what we call a tracking pixel, a tiny image of 1×1 that is transparent so the user will not be able to see it.
In order to install it, here is an example of what this code looks like:
```
<img src="https://piwik.example.com/piwik.php?idsite=YOUR_PIWIK_WEBSITE_ID&rec=1&bots=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Femail-opened%2Fnewsletter_XYZ&action_name=Email%20opened&_rcn=internal%20email%20name&_rck=newsletter_XYZ" style="border:0;” alt="" />
```
The Matomo tracking pixel explained

The above URL is composed of the following URL parameters which are part of our Tracking API:
- idsite: Corresponds to the ID of the website you would like to track.
- rec: You need to have rec=1 in order for the request to be actually recorded.
- bots: Set it to 1 to include all the connections made to this request, bots included.
- url: corresponds to the URL you would like to display in Matomo (Piwik) every time the email is opened.
- action_name: This is the page name you would like to be tracked when the email is opened.
- _rcn: The name you would like to give to your campaign.
- _rck: The keyword you may like to use in order to summarize the content of your newsletter.
You may have noticed some special characters here such as “%20”, “%2F”. That’s because the URL is encoded. We strongly recommend you to do so in order for your tracking not to break. Many tools are available on the web in order to encode your URLs such as https://www.urlencoder.org/.

If you would like to access the previous tracking code easily, keep in mind that you can always find the tracking code generator within the “Matomo admin panel → Tracking code”:

You can find more information about it on our guide at: How do I track how many users open and read my newsletter emails (using a pixel / beacon)?

As a result, the information will be pushed as following for any user who opens your email:

To not bias your regular page views on your website with newsletter openings, we recommend tracking newsletter openings into a new website.

Tracking even more data: the user ID example

You can go deeper in your URL tracking by inserting other parameters such as the user id if you have this information within your emailing database. One of the main benefit of tracking the User ID is to connect data across multiple devices and browsers for a given user.

You only need to add the following parameter &uid=XXX where XXX equals the dynamic value of the user ID:

Make sure that UID from your emailing provider is the same as the one used on your website in order for your data to be consistent.

Important note: some email providers are loading email messages by default which results in an opening even if the user did not actually open the email.

Step 2 – Measure the clicks within your emailing

Tracking clicks within an email lets you know with which content readers interacted the most. We recommend tracking all links in all your emails as a campaign, whether it is a newsletter, a custom support email, an email invoice, etc. You might be surprised to see which of your emails lead to conversions and if they don’t, try to tweak those emails, so they might in the future.

Tracking clicks This works thanks to URL campaign tracking. In order to perform this action, you will need to add Matomo (Piwik) URL parameters to all your existing link URLs:
- Website URL: for example “www.your-website.com”.
- Campaign name: for example “pk_campaign=emailing”. Represents the name you would like to give to your campaign.
- Campaign keyword: for example “pk_keyword=name-of-your-article”. Represents the name you would like to give to your content.
- Campaign source: for example “pk_source=newsletter”. Represents the name of the referrer.
- Campaign medium: for example “pk_medium=email”. Represents the type of referrer you are using.
- Campaign content: for example “pk_content=title”. Represents the type of content.
You can find more information about campaign url tracking in our “Tracking marketing campaigns with Matomo” guide.

Here is a sample showing you how you can differentiate some links in a newsletter, all pointing to the same URL:

Once you have added these URL parameters to each of your link, Matomo (Piwik) will clearly indicate the referrer of this specific campaign when a user clicks on a link in the newsletter and visits your website.

Important note: if you do not track your campaigns, it will result in a bad interpretation of your data within Matomo (Piwik) as you will get webmail services or direct entries as referrer instead of your newsletter campaign.

Step 3 – Measure emailing performances on your website

Thanks to Matomo (Piwik) URL campaign parameters, you can now clearly identify the traffic brought through your emailing. You can now specifically isolate users who come from emails by creating a segment:

Once done, you can either have a look at each user specifically through the visitor log report or analyze it as a whole within the rest of the reports.

You can even measure your return on investment directly if goals have been defined. In order to know more about how to track goals within Matomo (Piwik).

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The post How to measure the performance of a newsletter (or any email) with Matomo appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.
How to track Google AdWords campaigns with Piwik

19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft
In 2016, Google AdWords was the most popular ad service on earth. As a result, it may be your first source for ad spending. Are you interested in knowing whether you are making a profit out of it? Would you like to know how to track users coming from AdWords with Piwik efficiently? This is what this article is about.

What you need to know about Google AdWords

By default, each ad you create in Google AdWords is not tracked. Even worse than that, every click on your ad is identified in Piwik as an organic result coming from Google with the following value: “Keyword not defined”.

To make it simple, if you do not track your AdWords campaigns both your paid and organic traffic will be biased within your Piwik account. It will be impossible for you to measure your return on investment and it means that you are throwing your money down the drain.

In order to avoid this, we will show you how to track Google AdWords traffic into Piwik.

How to track paid Google AdWords campaigns into Piwik

If you want to analyze Google AdWords campaigns within Piwik properly, you need to add additional tracking parameters to the final URL of each of your ads.

We recommend using the following tool to add the needed additional tracking parameters: https://piwik.org/docs/tracking-campaigns-url-builder/

You will then be able to push additional data to Piwik such as:
- pk_campaign: the name of your ad campaign
- pk_kwd: the keyword associated to this campaign
- pk_source: the source of your campaign
- pk_medium: the type of source, in our case either cpc, cpm, cpa
- pk_content: the content of your ad
If your campaign URL looks like this: https://your-website.com/, your campaign URL will then look like this after adding the campaign parameters:
```
https://your-website.com/?pk_campaign=Name-Of-Your-Campaign&pk_kwd=Your-Keyword&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content=My-Ad-Headline
```
As each ad URL can be fired by different keywords and can correspond to different campaigns or headlines, you will need to customize the campaign parameters for each URL.

Customizing all of your URLs individually would take you a lot of time under circumstances. That’s why you should know, that each URL parameter can be filled automatically in AdWords with a feature called “Tracking template”.

Simplifying the campaign URL parameters with tracking templates

You can define tracking templates either at the account, campaign or ad group level. For example, by using a tracking template at the account level, all your campaigns will have the same landing page with the URL parameters you defined in the tracking template. By defining it at the campaign level, it means that all your ad groups within the campaign will have the same landing page and so on and so forth. Any tracking template defined in a campaign, will overwrite a tracking template defined at the account level.

Tracking template at the account level

To edit the template at the account level, you need to click on “Settings”, then click on the “Account” settings tab and define your tracking template pattern. For example:
```
https://your-website.com/?url={lpurl}&pk_campaign=AdWords&pk_kwd=Your-Keyword&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content=My-Ad-Headline
```
This will apply to all your URLs within your account. So it is only useful if your website domain is the same across all your ads. The URL parameter is compulsory here.

It can be limiting to have a static value for “pk_campaign” and “pk_kwd” so Google allows you to use dynamic insertion, such as follows:
```
https://your-landing-page.com/?url={lpurl}&pk_campaign={campaignid}&pk_kwd={keyword}&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content={creative}
```
The “{keyword}” means that the data is automatically replaced with the keyword which fired the ad within your account.

Visit the following page if you want to know more about the different dynamic tags that AdWords supports: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6305348#urlinsertion

Tracking template at the campaign level

If you wish to define a tracking template at the campaign level, you will find this option within the “Campaign” settings under the campaign URL options:

Tracking template at the Ad Group level

You can also set it at the Ad Group level within the “Ad Group” settings:

As Google mentions: “If you set up URL options at the campaign level, ad group level, or ad level, those settings will override the account-level options“.

Now that your URLs are properly configured, you will be able to analyze AdWords traffic performances within Piwik once a click is coming from those sources.

Did you like this article? If yes, do not hesitate to share it or give us your feedback about the topic you would like us to write about.
How to track Google AdWords campaigns with Matomo

19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft
In 2016, Google AdWords was the most popular ad service on earth. As a result, it may be your first source for ad spending. Are you interested in knowing whether you are making a profit out of it? Would you like to know how to track users coming from AdWords with Matomo (Piwik) efficiently? This is what this article is about.

What you need to know about Google AdWords

By default, each ad you create in Google AdWords is not tracked. Even worse than that, every click on your ad is identified in Matomo (Piwik) as an organic result coming from Google with the following value: “Keyword not defined”.

To make it simple, if you do not track your AdWords campaigns both your paid and organic traffic will be biased within your Matomo (Piwik) account. It will be impossible for you to measure your return on investment and it means that you are throwing your money down the drain.

In order to avoid this, we will show you how to track Google AdWords traffic into Matomo (Piwik).

How to track paid Google AdWords campaigns into Matomo

If you want to analyze Google AdWords campaigns within Matomo (Piwik) properly, you need to add additional tracking parameters to the final URL of each of your ads.

We recommend using the following tool to add the needed additional tracking parameters: https://matomo.org/docs/tracking-campaigns-url-builder/

You will then be able to push additional data to Matomo (Piwik) such as:
- pk_campaign: the name of your ad campaign
- pk_kwd: the keyword associated to this campaign
- pk_source: the source of your campaign
- pk_medium: the type of source, in our case either cpc, cpm, cpa
- pk_content: the content of your ad
If your campaign URL looks like this: https://your-website.com/, your campaign URL will then look like this after adding the campaign parameters:
```
https://your-website.com/?pk_campaign=Name-Of-Your-Campaign&pk_kwd=Your-Keyword&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content=My-Ad-Headline
```
As each ad URL can be fired by different keywords and can correspond to different campaigns or headlines, you will need to customize the campaign parameters for each URL.

Customizing all of your URLs individually would take you a lot of time under circumstances. That’s why you should know, that each URL parameter can be filled automatically in AdWords with a feature called “Tracking template”.

Simplifying the campaign URL parameters with tracking templates

You can define tracking templates either at the account, campaign or ad group level. For example, by using a tracking template at the account level, all your campaigns will have the same landing page with the URL parameters you defined in the tracking template. By defining it at the campaign level, it means that all your ad groups within the campaign will have the same landing page and so on and so forth. Any tracking template defined in a campaign, will overwrite a tracking template defined at the account level.

Tracking template at the account level

To edit the template at the account level, you need to click on “Settings”, then click on the “Account” settings tab and define your tracking template pattern. For example:
```
https://your-website.com/?url={lpurl}&pk_campaign=AdWords&pk_kwd=Your-Keyword&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content=My-Ad-Headline
```
This will apply to all your URLs within your account. So it is only useful if your website domain is the same across all your ads. The URL parameter is compulsory here.

It can be limiting to have a static value for “pk_campaign” and “pk_kwd” so Google allows you to use dynamic insertion, such as follows:
```
https://your-landing-page.com/?url={lpurl}&pk_campaign={campaignid}&pk_kwd={keyword}&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content={creative}
```
The “{keyword}” means that the data is automatically replaced with the keyword which fired the ad within your account.

Visit the following page if you want to know more about the different dynamic tags that AdWords supports: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6305348#urlinsertion

Tracking template at the campaign level

If you wish to define a tracking template at the campaign level, you will find this option within the “Campaign” settings under the campaign URL options:

Tracking template at the Ad Group level

You can also set it at the Ad Group level within the “Ad Group” settings:

As Google mentions: “If you set up URL options at the campaign level, ad group level, or ad level, those settings will override the account-level options“.

Now that your URLs are properly configured, you will be able to analyze AdWords traffic performances within Matomo (Piwik) once a click is coming from those sources.

Did you like this article? If yes, do not hesitate to share it or give us your feedback about the topic you would like us to write about.
Piwik 2 reaches end of life soon (December 2017), update now !

7 décembre 2017, par Piwik Core Team — Community
In less than three weeks, Piwik 2 will be no longer supported. This means that no further (security) updates will be released for this version. As per our Long Term Support announcement, Piwik 2.X is supported for 12 months after the initial release of Piwik 3.0.0 which was on December 18th 2016. Therefore, Piwik 2 will no longer receive any updates after December 18th 2017.

It has been almost a year since we released Piwik 3 and we highly recommend updating to Piwik 3 ASAP. The major new release came with a new UI, performance and security improvements. If you are still on Piwik 2, the security improvements alone should be worth updating your Piwik to Piwik 3 now. We cannot recommend this enough.

The update to Piwik 3 should be smooth, but may take a while depending on the amount of data you have.
- If you have any problem with the update, feel free to get in touch with us, or ask in the forums.
- If you are currently using Piwik self-hosted and would like to be upgraded, plus your Piwik managed in the official Cloud-hosted service, contact InnoCraft Cloud and they will migrate your database.
At Piwik and InnoCraft, the company of the makers of Piwik, we have seen many thousands of Piwik installations upgraded over the past year and look forward to an exciting future for Piwik 3 and beyond!
Matomo 2 reaches end of life soon (December 2017), update now !

7 décembre 2017, par Matomo Core Team — Community
In less than three weeks, Matomo (Piwik) 2 will be no longer supported. This means that no further (security) updates will be released for this version. As per our Long Term Support announcement, Matomo 2.X is supported for 12 months after the initial release of Matomo 3.0.0 which was on December 18th 2016. Therefore, Matomo 2 will no longer receive any updates after December 18th 2017.

It has been almost a year since we released Matomo (Piwik) 3 and we highly recommend updating to Matomo 3 ASAP. The major new release came with a new UI, performance and security improvements. If you are still on Matomo 2, the security improvements alone should be worth updating your Matomo to Matomo 3 now. We cannot recommend this enough.

The update to Matomo (Piwik) 3 should be smooth, but may take a while depending on the amount of data you have.
- If you have any problem with the update, feel free to get in touch with us, or ask in the forums.
- If you are currently using Matomo (Piwik) self-hosted and would like to be upgraded, plus your Matomo managed in the official Cloud-hosted service, contact InnoCraft Cloud and they will migrate your database.
At Matomo (Piwik) and InnoCraft, the company of the makers of Matomo, we have seen many thousands of Matomo installations upgraded over the past year and look forward to an exciting future for Matomo 3 and beyond!