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Matomo SSO options and why is it useful ?
8 novembre 2017, par Matomo Core Team — PluginsBored with typing again and again different logins and passwords for each service you have access to? Would you like to add hundreds or thousands of users with different roles to your Matomo (Piwik) at once? Would you like to save time and effort of managing your users while increasing the security in your business? Guess what, Matomo has come up with great features to do just that.
But what is a SSO?
Before introducing you to new Matomo (Piwik) features, let me explain what a SSO is.
SSO is the acronym for Single Sign On. As its name suggests this authentication process allows a user to access multiple applications with one set of login credentials.Advantages of using a SSO are numerous:
- improving security, for example when an employee is leaving your company, how can you check that all his credentials have been removed?
- reducing employees time-wasters such as having to enter logins/passwords each time.
- providing a centralized database for administrators. They can then easily manage permissions of all employees saving them heaps of time.
- reduces support costs related to authentication / accounts management.
In order to provide SSO options, two Matomo (Piwik) plugins have been developed and are available on the marketplace:
SAML
SAML stands for “Security Assertion Markup Language”, it is a standard in order to exchange authentication and authorization between an identity provider (OneLogin, Okta, Ping Identity, ADFS, Google, Salesforce, SharePoint…) and a service provider.
An identity provider is an online service that authenticates users on the Internet by using security tokens.Are you wondering if your business or organization is using any of these providers? We recommend to ask your operations team or sysadmin.
At InnoCraft, we developed a plugin in order to allow SSO with SAML for Matomo (Piwik). It can ensure consistent access control across the enterprise and external providers, potentially reducing support costs related to authentication and accounts management.
The installation process is straightforward. All you need is to get the SAML premium feature from the marketplace. Once installed, you will access the SAML configuration interface through the admin where you can configure various settings:
- SAML Status
- Identity Provider (Entity ID, SSO endpoint info, Public x509 certificate)
- Just-in-time provisioning and Mapping attributes
- Access Synchronization
- Advanced settings
From there you will need to follow our detailed documentation to have it up and running:
https://matomo.org/docs/login-saml/.
Once finished, you will then be able to use SAML to authenticate to your Matomo (Piwik) account:
As all premium features, SAML is eligible to a 30-day period money back guarantee, so do not hesitate to have it a try.
LDAP
LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. As its names implies LDAP is a directory, hosted on a server, which organizes the data about people in your company.
Thanks to the LDAP plugin, Matomo (Piwik) can be connected to your LDAP infrastructure and then use all its power in order to give each individual an access with different rights according to their needs.Let’s say that you have 1,000 employees within a company and they all need right now an access to the analytics reports in Matomo (Piwik) with different roles. This is what LDAP can do.
Moreover if your business or organization is already using LDAP, we recommend using the LDAP connector for Matomo (Piwik) for better security, to stop wasting time of your users and sysadmins, and to reduce the costs related to account management.
You understood it well. LDAP is a plugin which saves a LOT of time within an organization. Here is a preview of the settings part:
LDAP has been developed by the Matomo (Piwik) core team and is available as a Free plugin on the marketplace.
If you are surprised by the possibilities that Matomo (Piwik) is offering in terms of plugins, the good news is that many other plugins are waiting for you on the marketplace. Check out our premium marketplace which offers state-of-the-art plugins to get the most out of Matomo.
And if you are a developer feel free to create your own plugin, a detailed documentation is available at: https://developer.matomo.org/guides/getting-started-part-1.
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Piwik now integrated within CloudFlare
8 novembre 2017, par Piwik Core Team — DevelopmentWould you like to know some quick fix in order to make your website load faster? Would you like your users to have a better experience on your website? One answer to that is what we call a CDN. Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers that deliver content to a user based on various criterias such as geolocation.
And the good news for you is that Piwik got recently integrated to a popular CDN: CloudFlare.
What is CloudFlare?
As previously said, CloudFlare is a content delivery network (CDN).
The three major advantages of using CloudFlare as a CDN are:
- it is making your website load faster by providing a nearby location to your files to users
- it also help detecting potential attacks like DDoS and takes away these risks for you
- it runs one of the largest, fastest, and most reliable managed DNS service in the world
Automatically add Piwik tracking code to your website
With the integration of Piwik to CloudFlare, you can now deploy the Piwik tracking code directly through your CloudFlare account instead of tweaking the source code of your website.
In order to do that, all you need is to log in to your CloudFlare account and click on “Apps”. Then look for Piwik within the search bar:
Once done, click on “Preview” on your site to enter your credentials (Piwik URL and website ID):
Click “install” to finish the setup. The Piwik tracking code is now installed on each page of your website.
If you have previously added the tracking code manually to your website and now use the Piwik app, don’t forget to remove the tracking code from your website. Otherwise you end up tracking every user twice.
Important note: the Piwik CloudFlare integration only concerns the Piwik tracking code integration. For the Piwik app on Cloudflare to work you will need to have a running Piwik installed on your server, or you can start a free trial on the Piwik Analytics Cloud.
To learn more about what Piwik integration to CloudFlare can do for you.
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Find out what people are searching when coming from search engines
7 novembre 2017, par InnoCraft — PluginsAt InnoCraft, we know that SEO is an important topic for most of you. If you have not heard of this term before, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It consists in having your content website visible within the search result pages without paying for ads. SEO is also often referred as “natural” or “organic” traffic.
In SEO, one of the most valuable data to analyze is the keyword used by the visitor to come to your website. Since 2011, major search engines decided to not disclose this data anymore, that’s the reason why you are seeing the “Keyword not defined” data within some of your Piwik reports, also called “not provided”:
Keyword not defined in PiwikThe solution
As your keyword data is collected by search engines, each of them provides the searched keywords within different services such as:
- Google Search Console
- Bing/Yahoo Webmaster tools
- Yandex Webmaster
Those services allow website owners to see how many times their website appeared within the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), how bots are crawling your pages, which search terms they used, and more. The drawback is, that they make take this data available only for a short period, you need to log in to all these services to get the insights you need and you cannot get aggregated overall keyword reports (over all search engines combined).
The solution that gives you all this data in Piwik
Would you like to know what the not defined search keywords in Piwik really are? Would you like to combine keywords data from major search engines in one place? Would you like to know how important your website is according to Google and Microsoft Bing and Yahoo?
At InnoCraft, the company behind Piwik, we created a plugin called “Search Engine Performance Keywords”. With this plugin, you will:
- be able to keep the search terms forever
- save time by crossing data from Google and Bing search within Piwik
- get an overview of how Google and Bing are crawling your site
- monitor search rankings and click-through rates for each keyword
1 – Data ownership & data retention
Once more, it is going back to Piwik roots. As Piwik is a Free software, you own the data you collect. Once the import is successful, you will be able to keep the keywords data as long as you wish. In the case of services such as Google Search Console, they will delete the data after 90 days!! Without our plugin you will not be able to analyze precisely how your SEO is doing month by month, year by year.
2 – Save time by using a single interface
Google and Bing have no interest in gathering data coming from various search engines… we do. As a result, with our plugin you can visualize the data coming from those two sources within a single report in order to analyze your SEO in a better way.
You will not have to use spreadsheets anymore and no chance to miss some important keywords which you would maybe miss when you don’t aggregate them in a single report.
3 – Crawl overview check
Both Google and Bing have a crawl “budget”. This budget needs to be optimized in order for search engine bots to consider the most relevant pages. By gathering all the data within Piwik you will have a clear view of how well your website is appreciated by search engines:
4 – Monitor search rankings
The Search Engine Keywords Performance feature allows you to monitor search rankings for a given keyword and see his evolution:
it also gives you the possibility to compare the performances of several keywords in order to see how your website is performing as a whole:
How to get started?
The “Search Engine Keywords Performance” plugin has been developed by the InnoCraft team as a premium feature.
If you are not sure, note that InnoCraft is offering an unconditional and hassle-free 30-day money back guarantee period.
Once you have installed the plugin, follow the guide in order to have it up and running.
The installation process is not difficult in itself but takes some time as it requires to access to Google and Bing APIs.If you enjoyed this article, you may appreciate the following one about how to integrate ad services to Piwik: Make better online marketing decisions with the AOM plugin.
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Community survey revealed – Discover the profile of a Piwik user
7 novembre 2017, par Piwik Core Team — CommunityIn January 2017 we launched a Piwik community survey which gathered more than a thousand responses. It is now time for us to release the results of this study. We release today the results of this survey painting a picture of the growing Piwik Analytics community!
What types of businesses are using Piwik?
Just a reminder: Piwik is currently used on over 1 million websites and mobile apps.
According to the community survey, 75% of businesses using Piwik are small companies and 25% are medium to large enterprises. Out of those 25%, more than 7% are large enterprises with more than a 1,000 of employees.
Why choosing Piwik?
With a large majority, Open Source came first with almost 50% of the answers, then come the data security aspect (27%) in third comes the raw data access (10,5%) and for a minor part customizability with 1,9%.
How often is Piwik used?
92% of respondents said that they are using Piwik regularly (at least once per month):
- on a daily basis 28%
- on a weekly basis 41%
- on a monthly basis 23%
Is Piwik mostly installed on Intranet or External websites?
Piwik is mainly installed on external websites, 80% of the cases. However, 12% of respondents answer that they are using it on intranet too. The remaining 8% have chosen not to answer.
Which CRM for Piwik users?
As CRM is a high valuable asset within the company, we wanted to check if there were any needs for Piwik to develop something specifically for CRM.
The answers showed us that in almost 60% of the cases no CRM was used at all, for the rest there is no clear leading CRM which is used more than others.Do Piwik users wish more integrations to third party applications such as CRM, support systems?
60% of responders said no, which can clearly be understood from previous question. But the 40% remaining are clearly showing that they wish more integrations. We heard you, we are constantly updating our integration page. If there are any integrations you wish to have, do not hesitate to contact the solution provider and suggest them to integrate their product with Piwik.
How do Piwik users get notified when a KPI reach a specific value?
Great question, great answers. Almost 50% of responders are not notified when something happens in Piwik and prefer to have a look at the UI instead. 15% did not know that it was possible using Custom Alerts but may have a look it. Some of you are also designing their own system. It made us realize here that we need to change our UI and integrate custom alerts to the main UI directly. Custom alerts is a great feature that you can access within the administration panel to get notified when something happened in your Piwik data.
Which improvements could be made to Piwik?
Only 20% of you answered to this question, which is a good thing for us
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How to sell Piwik services without any confusion ?
10 octobre 2017, par InnoCraft — PluginsAs you may know, Piwik is a Free software under the GPL license which guarantees you:
- The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
- The freedom to study how it works and change it.
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your changes.
- The freedom to redistribute it under the GPL license, and to sell it if you wish.
In this article we will focus on the Free aspect of Piwik, which is how to rebrand Piwik, how to offer your clients a better experience, and possibly how to make a profit from it?
How to sell Piwik services as an agency?
As a web analytics software, Piwik is often installed by web agencies when it comes to designing a brand new website for a given customer.
Most of the time agencies are using Piwik for the following reasons:- free of charge
- data ownership
- user privacy compliance
- feature rich while easy to use
- open source
Most of the agencies are charging their customers for the installation process, tracking code implementation, analysing reports to get insights about users… but do you know that you could also sell the software as your own brand? This is where the “White Label” plugin, developed by the InnoCraft company, comes into play.
White labelling for Piwik
Creating a “white label” plugin came into the mind of InnoCraft founders when they realized that on any modern Piwik installation, the following components were visible:
- Piwik branded widgets within the dashboards
- Piwik marketplace plugin teasers on the admin page
- Piwik help and support pages
- the “Piwik” word in general
- Piwik Mobile app banners
Example of Piwik branded widgets
In order to remove all those mentions of Piwik and to start selling this web analytics under your own name, you can either hack Piwik on your own (it is going to take you some precious time and money) or have a look at the White Label plugin on the marketplace where InnoCraft has solved all the challenges already for you.
The White Label plugin is straightforward. Once downloaded and installed, you will have access to a dedicated interface where you will be able to change the Piwik name by a new custom brand of your choice:
Piwik White Label settings
Once you click Save, all “Piwik” mentions will be substituted by your company name/service:
Here the Piwik version is changed by the name of the company
How to make your installation even more customized?
Few Piwik users know about this trick, but since 2014 the Piwik templates can be customized through Themes. You are free to design your own template, installing existing ones, or even monetize them through the marketplace:
A simple example of how Piwik can be easily customized, here fonts and colours are changed
If you want to know how you can tweak your existing template and make it match your brand and image, just follow our theme documentation. A simple theme with your colors can be built in a few minutes simply by defining different color codes. You can also browse the public themes on the Marketplace.
Tell us your story
If you are an agency or any business related in selling Piwik services, we recommend having a look at our FAQ for rebranding, selling, reusing, re-licensing, and including Piwik in my offering. Are you interested or already re-selling Piwik services? We would love to hear your story and write a blog post about it.
Do not hesitate to contact the Piwik core team, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.
