Piwik

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• 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!

• Tracking User Acquisition and Social Media Activity with Piwik

  25 avril 2017, par Florian Hieß — Community

  Being 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

  20 avril 2017, par InnoCraft — Community, Development

  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

  18 avril 2017, par InnoCraft — Community, Development

  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 onload event. 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.