Les articles publiés sur le site
-
Tracking User Acquisition and Social Media Activity with Piwik
25 avril 2017, par Florian Hieß — CommunityBeing able to monitor user acquisition and social media activity is essential for determining whether the outcome of your campaigns is in line with the business objectives. Determining the source of each website visit that gets you closer to your business goals enables you to focus your efforts in the directions that are worth it. In this article you will learn why it is important to identify your traffic sources and how you can track user acquisition with Piwik Analytics.
Why Is It Important to Identify Traffic Sources on Your Website?
Since brands nowadays use multiple channels for promotion and advertising, identifying the touch points and traffic sources of a lead or customer seems to become more and more difficult. And yet, this channel multiplication is what makes the source of a purchase more important. Once you identify the traffic origin and how each source is performing you are able to increase your efforts on the best performers, both in terms of human resources and monetary investments, to attract more leads or customers in these marketing channels.
The default referrer types are defined by:
- Search engine
- Direct traffic
- Websites and
- Campaigns
But consider that within the “Campaigns” type, each of the following referrers is a possible traffic source for your website and can be tracked with the Piwik URL builder:
- Google AdWords
- Display Ads, Banners
- Links in Newsletters, Emailing
- Affiliate links
- Tweets
- Facebook Ads
Measure your performance and conversion
With so many options, wouldn’t you like to know which one of them worked best? To rate channels based on their performance, you first need to establish conversion goals and attribution.
A conversion can be anything from sign-ups or downloads to leads, registered users and even paying customers. Define conversions based on what you want people to do once they’ve landed on your website.
You need to define each conversion type in the Piwik dashboard, so that the analytics platform knows what to track. As far as attribution goes, Piwik by default links the conversion and attributes to the last seen (non-direct) referrer. You are able to change that to the first referrer in the attribution line by following the instructions in this conversion attribution FAQ.
Track Your User Acquisition Right with Piwik
Using the Piwik URL Builder tool, you can tag each URL you promote in your campaigns using relevant keywords. Provided that your URLs are tagged, whenever someone clicks on them, the campaign will be listed as the referrer in the Piwik dashboard. Once you’ve generated trackable URLs, you can include them in your social media posts which could be planned and scheduled using a social media management tool such as Swat.io.
Campaign URLs work wonders for telling which campaign helped you reach your goals faster, more efficiently and so on but they do have a downside. They only work for URLs that you’ve shared. If someone decides to share a link of yours on social media they won’t be tagged beforehands. This is where the Referrers section of Piwik comes in handy, as it acts as a backup for tracking traffic sources. The overview tab features a graph that can help you identify when spikes occurred.
As well as a numerical representation of the main referrer categories for the selected time period.
Switching from Overview to Websites & Social, you can see a graphical representation of the social networks acting as referrers. The visualization can be changed to bar graphs or table, and can be easily exported in various formats for reports.
The websites list features not only the social referrers, but all of the websites generating visits to your website. With Piwik you should not have issues with referrer spam, as the Piwik core team has tackled this problem early on, as detailed in how to stop referrer spam. Our analytics spam blacklist is a public project on GitHub.
Assuming that you’re relying only on Facebook and VK.com for your campaigns, as the above screenshot would suggest, you might want to give paid advertising a try on these two social networks. Paid ads can increase reach and engagement, can get more relevant visitors to your website and can have a snowball effect in a short period of time.
What Social Networks Can Piwik Track?
Piwik’s built-in social network list is quite extensive, as it currently features 70 platforms. The entries range from popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to more obscure ones such as Renren. However, this list is not available by default, and to see it or alter it, you would need a third-party plugin.
How Does the Referrers Manager Plugin for Piwik Work?
The Referrers Manager plugin for Piwik provides access to the list of search engines and social networks that this analytics platform can handle by default. The simple plugin can come in handy when sorting out referrers. First of all, it displays a list of all search engines and social networks that Piwik can handle by default. Secondly, it enables users to disable/enable the platform’s default social network list. And using Referrers Manager, you can add custom engines or social networks to the referrers list in case they’re not already available.
Conclusions
Piwik is a very capable analytics platform as it is, but combined with third-party plugins such as Referrers Manager, it can provide even better insights on where your visitors are coming from. Remember to correlate the referrers with goals in order to determine which website or social network performs best in your context. And don’t forget to assign a monetary revenue value to each goal, in order to determine your social media ROI with greater accuracy.
-
Performance optimizations you can apply today to load the Piwik JavaScript tracker faster
When you track your website with Piwik or any other analytics solution, you need to embed a JavaScript file in order to track page views, events, clicks, and more. At InnoCraft, it is our daily business to help Piwik users to make the most out of their Piwik. We often see similar problems of websites loading unnecessarily slower because the tracking file is not loaded as fast as it should be. There are many ways you can improve the performance but avoiding the most important mistakes will help you to not lose revenue and conversions because of this today. Below you find a few steps that will boost the loading of your Piwik JavaScript tracking file.Cache piwik.js
The most important step is to make sure to configure your server in a way so the piwik.js JavaScript tracker file will be cached once it has been loaded and not requested again on subsequent page views. Learn more about browser caching.
Enable GZIP
We recommend enabling GZIP as it reduces the size the user needs to load when the piwik.js file is requested. For the standard Piwik tracker, this will reduce the size from about 60KB to 20KB.
Preload DNS
Often a Piwik is hosted on a different domain and when the browser loads the JavaScript tracker file, it needs to first perform a DNS lookup to find the IP address for this domain. By adding the below snipped for your Piwik domain, it can boost the performance of loading the tracker file by 10ms to 50ms.
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//example.innocraft.cloud">Preload resource
To boost the loading of the Piwik tracking file, you can add the following HTML into the header of your website:
<link rel="preload" href="https://yourpiwikdomain.com/piwik.js" onload="embedTracker()" type="script" crossorigin>In Chrome, Opera, and soon in more browsers this will load the JavaScript tracker file without blocking the “onload” event. As a result, as soon as you embed the tracking code, the JavaScript tracker might be already loaded. How “preloading” affects your website always depends and maybe you rather want to preload more important resources than the tracking code, but it is an option to consider. If you load your JavaScript tracker file in the
<head>of your website, this should not be needed.Advanced options
If you want to go even further, you can think about serving the JavaScript tracking file via a CDN, merging the JavaScript tracker file content with your other JavaScript files, making use of service workers (and even track data offline), and more. Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions.
More performance improvements
Read our first blog in the series at Different ways of embedding the Piwik tracking code for faster website performance
-
Different ways of embedding the Piwik tracking code for faster website performance
Many studies have shown that performance matters a lot. For each 100ms a websites takes longer to load, a business may lose about 0.1% to 1% in revenue. It also matters because Google judges page speed as a ranking factor for search results page. At InnoCraft, we help our clients optimizing their Piwik integration and recommend different ways of embedding the tracking code tailored to their needs. The best way to embed the tracking code depends on your website, what you want to achieve, and how important tracking is to you.This technical blog post mainly focuses on improving the time to load your website. This is an important metric as for example Google usually measures the time it took to load a page. Many businesses therefore want to get to the page load event as quickly as possible.
The regular way of embedding the tracking code
By default, Piwik is embedded in the header or footer of your website. This is a sensible default. While it is loaded asynchronously and deferred, it still does delay the
onloadevent. Depending on the performance of your Piwik, how fast your website loads, how your website’s resources are embedded, and other factors you may want to consider alternatives. Three of them I will introduce below.Embedding the tracker after the load event
To ensure that your website will always load even if the Piwik server is un-available, you may want to load the tracking code only after the website is loaded like this:
var _paq = _paq || []; _paq.push(["trackPageView"]); _paq.push(["enableLinkTracking"]); function embedTrackingCode() { var u="https://your.piwik.domain/"; _paq.push(["setTrackerUrl", u+"piwik.php"]); _paq.push(["setSiteId", "1"]); var d=document, g=d.createElement("script"), s=d.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; g.type="text/javascript"; g.defer=true; g.async=true; g.src=u+"piwik.js"; s.parentNode.insertBefore(g,s); } if (window.addEventListener) { window.addEventListener("load", embedTrackingCode, false); } else if (window.attachEvent) { window.attachEvent("onload",embedTrackingCode); } else { embedTrackingCode(); }The downside is you won’t track all of your visitors because some will have already left your website by the time your website is fully loaded. Especially when you have a JavaScript-heavy website or when your website takes longer to load in general. To detect the load event correctly cross browser, you may want to use a library like jQuery.
Delaying the tracking
Another technique is to load the tracking with a little delay at the end of your website like this:
setTimeout(function () { embedTrackingCode(); }, 5);This time the tracking script will still track most of your visitors but does not slow down loading the rest of your website as much as it would do by default (at least perceived). In some cases, you will notice a performance improvement when looking at the “time to load” but it depends on your website.
Not loading the JavaScript Tracker at all
With Piwik you also have the option to not embed the tracking code into your websites at all and instead generate reports from the webserver logs using Piwik Log Analytics. This works very well but some data might not be available like the device resolution which can be only captured using JavaScript. On the bright side this solution also captures users with ad blockers or tracking blockers.
Questions?
We invite you to test different ways to see what makes sense for you and how it affects your website performance as well as the perceived performance. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with us.
Read on
The last post in this series is Performance optimizations you can apply today to load the Piwik JavaScript tracker faster.
-
Still on Piwik 2 ? Update now to Piwik 3, the most efficient and secure Piwik version
5 avril 2017, par Piwik Core Team — CommunityIt has been almost four months since we released Piwik 3. 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 now to Piwik 3. We cannot recommend this enough.
Since the Piwik 3.0 release we have released three new versions that fix over 250 issues including more performance and security issues. And new features: the Life Time Revenue, or the Cross Domain linking feature to track visitors across different domains accurately. Also, most plugins from the Piwik Marketplace are now compatible with Piwik 3 so there is no reason to wait anymore.
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. At Piwik and at InnoCraft, the company of the makers of Piwik, we have successfully updated many Piwik installations.
Wondering what’s changed?
-
Form Analytics for Piwik now available : Find the pain points on your online forms to improve conversions
14 mars 2017, par InnoCraft — CommunityHi, this is Tom from InnoCraft, the company of the makers of Piwik Analytics. Do you hate losing your visitors on your online or intranet forms and leaving revenue on the table? If you feel like us, we have got you covered. Form Analytics gives you all the insights you possibly need to increase your form conversion rates with 100% data ownership and no limits.
Whether it is a landing page, sign-up form, checkout, cart, squeeze page, feedback form, survey, or a job application form. Online forms have become super critical to all businesses. The problem is, you can only improve what you measure. Otherwise, you never really know what to change on your forms, and whether you make things better or worse.
-> Read the rest of the story on the Form Analytics Marketplace page.
What does the new Form Analytics reports look like?
Form Analytics adds over 50 new metrics, 15 new reports & widgets, new real time reports, new segments and more to your Piwik.
To see more screenshots check out the Form Analytics preview or have a look at the Form Analytics website
Where do I get Form Analytics?
Form Analytics is available on the Piwik Marketplace:
Form Analytics 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 Form Analytics!
