Piwik

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• Community survey revealed – Discover the profile of a Piwik user

  7 novembre 2017, par Piwik Core Team — Community

  In 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

• How to sell Piwik services without any confusion ?

  10 octobre 2017, par InnoCraft — Plugins

  As 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.

  Get White Label for Piwik

  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.

  Write for Piwik

  Do not hesitate to contact the Piwik core team, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

• 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.