Piwik

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• ASPSMS : a successful integration with Piwik

  3 octobre 2017, par Piwik Core Team — Development

  Have you ever wondered how an integration between a third party company and Piwik is possible? What are the key factors for a good partnership? This article describes our recent collaboration with a company for a mobile messaging integration.

  At Piwik, we are always looking for new functionalities to build and improve the work of our community members. ASPSMS, an innovative SMS Gateway & Messaging solutions provider got in contact with us in order to do just this.

  Why did we decide to partner with ASPSMS?

  • Fast
  • Easy
  • Just works

  Those three words define the collaboration we had with ASPSMS and in the end everyone benefits.

  Stefan, one of our developers who did the integration into Piwik, says “Thanks to an easy to understand API the SMS integration was done in a couple of hours. We got SMS credits upfront for testing which helped a lot.”

  Using the ASPSMS integration, you can receive a daily or weekly SMS message listing the Key Performance Indicators of your website(s).

  ASPSMS is now part of Piwik through the Mobile messaging settings:

  

  As a company, how can I contribute to Piwik?

  If, like ASPSMS, you are providing great services which can help Piwik final users take better decisions, do not hesitate to contact the Piwik core team.

  You can also start to develop your own, specific plugins, that you can freely publish on the Piwik marketplace.

  About ASPSMS

  VADIAN.NET AG is today one of the leading global providers of SMS solutions with more than 200,000 satisfied business clients. The product ASPSMS was launched in 2001. ASPSMS is a product of VADIAN.NET AG, a Swiss based Internet and Mobile Solutions provider.

  

  Learn more about ASPSMS.

• How you can use the Piwik AOM plugin to improve your data and make better online marketing decisions

  13 septembre 2017, par André Kolell — Plugins, AdWords, Bing, Case Study, Criteo, eccommerce tracking, Facebook Ads, how to install piwik analytics, how-to piwik, integration, piwik, Taboola

  Hi, this is André, one of the authors of the Piwik Advanced Online Marketing plugin, which has just hit 5,000 downloads on the Piwik marketplace. In this blog post I’ll show you how Piwik AOM improves your data and enables you to make better online marketing decisions.

  Piwik itself is excellent in tracking all kinds of visitor data, like where a visitor is coming from and what he’s doing on your page or app (pageviews, events, conversions). But what Piwik did not yet take a closer a look at, is how much you’ve invested into your marketing activities and how profitable they are.

  With the Piwik AOM plugin you can integrate data like advertising costs, advertising campaign names, ad impressions etc. from advertising platforms (such as Google AdWords, Microsoft Bing, Criteo, Facebook Ads and Taboola) and individual campaigns (such as such as cost per view/click/acquisition and fixed price per months deals) into Piwik and combine that data with individual Piwik visits.

  Piwik AOM adds a new marketing performance report to Piwik giving you a great overview of all your marketing activities with drill-down functionality:

  

   

  When taking a look at a specific visitor, Piwik AOM shows you the exact cost of acquiring a specific visit:

  

   

  Leveraging Piwik AOM’s full potential

  But although you can access Piwik AOM’s valuable data directly in the Piwik UI for ad-hoc analyses, Piwik AOM’s true strength comes into play when working with the raw data in an external business intelligence application of your choice, where you can further integrate Piwik AOM’s data with your most accurate backend data (like conversion’s contribution margins after returns, new vs. existing customer, etc.).

  Piwik AOM offers some API endpoints that allow you to fetch the data you need but you can also retrieve it directly from Piwik AOM’s aom_visits table, which includes all visits, all allocated advertising costs and advertising campaign details. As there is never data being deleted from aom_visits, the table can easily be connected to your ETL tool with its last update timestamp column. A third way to get data out of Piwik AOM is by developing your own Piwik plugin and listening to the AOM.aomVisitAddedOrUpdated event, which is posted whenever an aom_visits record is added or updated.

  Integrating Piwik AOM’s data with your backend data in the business intelligence application of your choice allows you to evaluate the real performance of your online marketing campaigns when applying different conversion attribution models, conduct customer journey analyses, create sophisticated forecasts and whatever you can think of.

  AOM Use case

  A company that followed this approach, is FINANZCHECK.de, one of Germany’s leading loan comparison websites. At the eMetrics summit 2016 in Berlin, Germany, I gave a talk about FINANZCHECK’s architectural online marketing setup. Until recently, FINANZCHECK used Pentaho data integration to integrate data from Piwik, Piwik AOM and additional internal tools like its proprietary CRM software into Jaspersoft, its data warehouse an BI solution. The enriched data in Jaspersoft was not only used for reporting to various stakeholders but also for optimising all kinds of marketing activities (e.g. bids for individual keywords in Google AdWords) and proactive alerting. Not long ago, FINANZCHECK started an initiative to improve its setup even further – I’ll hopefully be able to cover this in a more detailed case study soon.

  Roadmap

  In the past, we had the chance to make great progress in developing this plugin by solving specific requirements of different companies who use Piwik AOM. During the next months, we plan to integrate more advertising platforms, reimplement Facebook Ads, improve the support of individual campaigns and work on the general plugin stability and performance.

  Before you install Piwik AOM

  Before installing Piwik AOM, you should know that its initial setup and even its maintenance can be quite complex. Piwik AOM will heavily modify your Piwik installation and you will only benefit from Piwik AOM if you are willing to invest quite some time into it.

  If you are not familiar with Piwik’s internals, PHP, MySQL, database backups, cronjobs, creating API accounts at the advertising platforms or adding parameters to your advertising campaign’s URLs, you should probably not install it on your own (at least not in your production environment).

  Piwik AOM has successfully been tested with up to 25k visitors a day for a period of more than two years, running on an AWS server with 4 GB RAM, once CPU and a separate AWS RDS MySQL database.

  Ideas and Support

  If you have ideas for new features or need support with your Piwik AOM installation or leveraging your marketing data’s potential in general, feel free to get in touch with the plugin’s co-author Daniel or me. You can find our contact details on the plugin’s website http://www.advanced-online-marketing.com.

  How to get the Piwik AOM plugin?

  The Piwik AOM plugin is freely available through the Piwik marketplace at https://plugins.piwik.org/AOM

  Did you like this article? If yes do not hesitate to share it or give your feedback about the topic you would like us to write about.

• The new GDPR data protection regulation and potential consequences on Piwik

  7 septembre 2017, par Piwik Core Team — About, Privacy

  GDPR is a new data protection related regulation in Europe. GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation.

  The purpose of this European regulation is to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union. This also includes entities outside Europe willing to do business with European citizens. GDPR is a set of processes you need to follow within your organization to protect the privacy of European citizens.

  GDPR will start to apply in May 2018. It is recognized to be dissuasive because of the potential penalty of up to 4% of the yearly turnover, in case of infringement.

  Many articles have been written about GDPR including our previous article. Few of them are explaining how it will affect web analytics vendors: this is what this article is about.

  Am I really impacted by GDPR if I am a Piwik user?

  As Piwik can collect personal data, the answer is yes. Piwik analytics data is impacted by the GDPR.

  As GDPR is a general concept, we decided from the official guidelines to assume what will be the potential consequences on the use of Piwik.

  There are 2 potential scenarios we can identify:

  • 1 – You are collecting personal data with Piwik
  • 2 – You are not collecting personal data with Piwik

  1 – Personal data collection with Piwik

  According to GDPR: IP addresses, cookies, UserID are personal data.

  IP addresses are personal data, so you will have to anonymize them unless you receive explicit consent from the visitor. Please view the following article in order to learn: how can I anonymize IP addresses in Piwik?

  According to GDPR, cookies are personal data too. But as all cookies are not created equal it may be possible that some need to require user consent whereas other not. Whatever will be the final decision, you can learn about the first-party cookies created by Piwik and  how to disable all tracking cookies in Piwik?

  User ID, you are impacted if the User ID you assign is specific to an individual or if you can cross the User ID data further and find back the individual personal data.

  Any extra personal data you may collect with Piwik, it could be for example: first names, family names, e-mail address… You are able to collect such data using custom dimensions, custom variables…

  What are the rules I have to comply with?

  By collecting personal data, you will have to respect EU citizens rights, which include:

  • The possibility for them to view the data you collected on them
  • The possibility to rectify some data concerning them
  • The possibility to delete their data when they request about it

  As you can imagine, for the first obligation, you will have to export all the data. So if a user is requesting it, you will have to export the data linked to his IP address(es). It can be easily exported as a .csv file for example.
  In order to do that, just create a segment according to the IP address of the user who requested it and then export the “Visitor log” report.
  If the personal data is not linked with the IP address but other attributes such as User ID or a custom dimension, you can provide the same data export by using the segment function and filtering on the personal data field.

  The data edit and deletion process on Piwik is a bit trickier as it currently requires administration system skills. We are planning to develop a new plugin for GDPR compliance (which will be available for free on the Marketplace). This plugin will let you edit and easily delete data of a particular user. Currently you can delete a specific user’s data by accessing the Piwik database and directly delete the different records for this specific user.

  2 – You are not collecting personal data with Piwik

  Unfortunately it is not because you do not collect personal data that you will not be affected by GDPR.
  The details of GDPR are not confirmed yet and GDPR could involve enabling the DoNotTrack setting by default on all browsers.
  Yes, you read it well, by default, unless the internet user uncheck this option, Piwik respecting DoNoTrack would not be able to track any user. If one needed to collect data anyway, Piwik Log Analytics and server-side tracking can be considered.

  If you need help regarding how to set up your Piwik installation in order to be GDPR compliant:

  Contact us

  Do you have a Piwik experience you would like to share with the community? Please share it with us by contacting Piwik core team.

• Piwik Analytics and becoming a Piwik Certified Professional

  10 juillet 2017, par Piwik Core Team — About

  Digital Analytics software

  Piwik Analytics is the leading open source digital analytics software, offering users around the world an opportunity to liberate their analytics. Most recently, they have introduced the Piwik Certified Professional certification exam which now allows users to become qualified in Piwik Analytics software on an individual level to gain a deeper understanding of Piwik. In this blog post I will guide you through the topics that are covered during the exam and provide you with advice on taking the official Piwik Certified Professional exam.

  

  Piwik certification exam

  Taking the exam will cost you a maximum investment of 60 minutes of your time, besides learning all materials of course. The exam consists of 55 multiple choice questions with four answers to choose from. The score needed to pass is 80% (44 questions answered correctly) and the cost is 50 USD total. An earned certificate is valid for 18 months, before these eighteen months are over a person should pass the exam again in order to retain the certified status.

  Learning topics

  The exam consists of two sections. The main section is focused on the Piwik Analytics software itself while the second part relates to digital analytics in general. All topics and content covered about Piwik Analytics is available through the official Piwik user guides. The second section tests your experience as a digital analyst, online marketer or any other function title in which you work with Piwik Analytics. In this case, the general digital analytics questions should be quite straightforward and easy to answer, and cover only a fraction of the total questions in the exam (around 10% with 5-7 general questions). An outline of all exam topics are listed below:

  • A Tour of Piwik
  • Track Goals and Measure Conversions
  • Event Tracking
  • Content Tracking
  • Ecommerce Analytics
  • Row Evolution – View and compare historical data
  • Segmentation – Compare segments of visitors
  • Visitors Maps – World, region, city
  • Real Time Visitor World Map
  • Real Time Analytics
  • The Visitor Profile
  • Site speed and Page speed
  • Site Search Tracking and Reporting
    
  • Transitions – Analyze the previous and following actions of your visitors for each page
  • Page Overlay
  • Custom Variables Analytics
  • Custom Dimensions
  • User ID
  • Annotating your data
  • Tracking Campaigns
  • URL Builder for Marketing Campaign Tracking

  The best way to prepare for the exam is read the entire Piwik user guides. You should definitely read the “Analytics Features” section since most questions of the Piwik Certified Professional – Digital Analytics exam that will be asked come from these sections. Furthermore you should be able to find your way around in Piwik at a basic level which means you know what the reports mean and where to find certain information. In addition, some basic knowledge regarding the settings is useful too. The exam is definitely not a technical implementation exam so no coding knowledge or any other deeply technical knowledge regarding Piwik is required.

  Finally, some general questions will be asked regarding digital analytics covering topics about KPI’s and the role of the analyst within an organization. While Piwik provides some links to articles by Avinash Kaushik covering these topics, you will not be able to learn these topics just by reading. When you have some experience with digital analytics you should be able to answer these general digital analytics questions with common sense and (even basic) experience as a digital analyst, analytics consultant, online marketer or any other related job whereby you work with Piwik.

  Taking the exam

  With 55 questions to be answered in 60 minutes the key to passing the exam is to keep moving. You have about 1 minute and 5 seconds to answer each question. This means that you should focus on the easiest questions first and return later to the questions that are a bit more challenging to answer. Keep an eye on the timer that will be displayed in the exam window. When the time expires or you click ‘Finish test’ your exam will end and be automatically submitted for review. Remember to first check all questions and answers before you click on the ‘Finish test’ button. If you click too soon and you still haven’t answered all questions, all unanswered questions will be marked as incorrect.

  During the test, no hard copy or online materials may be referenced. As you can imagine, it is almost impossible to check if users reference these kind of materials. However, be aware of the penalty system that is in place during the test. When a user leaves from the active test screen to another screen (i.e. a different browser tab) the screen turns red and provides a warning count when the user returns to the test screen again. You will have three warnings, after this your test will be submitted and graded as false. Furthermore, keep in mind you will have to do the test in one go and cannot pause and come back another time.

  Practice makes perfect

  Below I have included some example questions that could be asked during the exam. These questions do not necessarily represent how Piwik will test you on these topics.

  • What is the default report date that is selected by Piwik?
  • Why would someone flatten a report in Piwik?
  • Why would a user especially use the Page Overlay report?
  • What are the three main Ecommerce interactions tracked with Piwik?
  • What is an example of an anonymized IP address in Piwik?

  Passing the Piwik Certified Professional – Digital Analytics exam

  Directly after submitting the exam you will receive a notification telling you whether or not you have passed the exam. If you pass, you will be able to download your personal certification right away. A report of your exam performance will also be available. This report lists the amount of correct answers and total questions by topic. The report with your exam performance is also available if you did not pass the exam. The certificate is valid for 18 months from the date of successful completion.

  Sometimes the difference between passing and failing can be a matter of how you interpret some of Piwik’s questions. There are several tricky questions included, so be sure to pay attention to detail on every question. If you fail, you may take the exam again. You will have to pay the 50 USD fee for each try, so do your best to pass it the first time.

  → Register to become a Piwik Certified Professional.

  We wish you the best of luck and happy analytics!

• Understand your visitors by seeing where they click, hover, type and scroll, and replay their actions in a video

  18 mai 2017, par InnoCraft — Plugins

  Hi, this is Mike from InnoCraft, the company of the makers of Piwik Analytics which is used by over 1 million websites and apps in over 150 countries.

  I’m very proud to introduce you to our Heatmap & Session Recording feature which lets you analyze your visitors’ behaviour on a whole new level that was not possible before.

  With Heatmaps you can see where people think something is clickable but it is not, how far down the page do they scroll, whether they see your important buttons and Call To Actions, or even whether you can re-position your page layout to put the important content in more visible places. Both the mouse movements and all clicks are recorded and viewable on these new beautiful heatmap visualisations.

  With Session Recordings, you get to see a video showing exactly what a visitor did on your pages, including all mouse movements, scrolls, text typed in the keyboard, and more. Using these recordings you can improve the usability on your website, replace costly (and less effective) eye tracking sessions, and you can now see exactly what problems your visitors experience or how they behave on your website. This gives new insights and ability to understand what your users think.

  -> Read the rest of the story on the Heatmaps & Session Recordings Marketplace page.

  What does the new Heatmaps reports look like?

  Here is below just a little preview of the new Heatmaps reports.

  1) Mouse move and Click Heatmaps

  

  2) A Scroll Heatmap

  

  What does the new Session Recording look like?

  You can replay videos of exactly what your users did on your websites including mouse moves, scrolls, typing in forms, and more.

  1) Listing all recorded video sessions

  

  2) Playing a recorded video session

  

  Where do I get Heatmaps & Session Recording for Piwik?

  The new premium plugin is available on the Piwik Marketplace:

  Get Heatmaps & Session Recording on the Marketplace

  This is a premium plugin for Piwik and comes with our 14 day money back guarantee and 1-click installation & updates (all product updates come for free).

  You can also signup for a free Piwik Cloud-hosted trial to discover the power of Heatmaps & Session Recordings!