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• How to add new pages and menu items to Piwik – Introducing the Piwik Platform

  11 septembre 2014, par Thomas Steur — Development

  This is the next post of our blog series where we introduce the capabilities of the Piwik platform (our previous post was How to create a widget). This time you’ll learn how to extend Piwik by adding new pages and menu items. For this tutorial you will need to have basic knowledge of PHP and optionally of Twig which is the template engine we use.

  What can be displayed in a page ?

  To make it short : You can display any corporate related content, key metrics, news, help pages, custom reports, contact details, information about your server, forms to manage any data and anything else.

  Getting started

  In this series of posts, we assume that you have already set up your development environment. If not, visit the Piwik Developer Zone where you’ll find the tutorial Setting up Piwik.

  To summarize the things you have to do to get setup :

  • Install Piwik (for instance via git).
  • Activate the developer mode : ./console development:enable --full.
  • Generate a plugin : ./console generate:plugin --name="MyControllerPlugin". There should now be a folder plugins/MyControllerPlugin.
  • And activate the created plugin under Settings => Plugins.

  Let’s start creating a page

  We start by using the Piwik Console to create a new page :

  ./console generate:controller

  The command will ask you to enter the name of the plugin the controller should belong to. I will simply use the above chosen plugin name “MyControllerPlugin”. There should now be two files plugins/MyControllerPlugin/Controller.php and plugins/MyControllerPlugin/templates/index.twig which both already contain an example to get you started easily :

  Controller.php

  class Controller extends \Piwik\Plugin\Controller
  {
      public function index()
      {
          return $this->renderTemplate('index', array(
               'answerToLife' => 42
          ));
      }
  }
  Télécharger

  and templates/index.twig

  {% extends 'dashboard.twig' %}
   
  {% block content %}
      <strong>Hello world!</strong>
      <br/>
   
      The answer to life is {{ answerToLife }}
  {% endblock %}
  Télécharger

  Note : If you are generating the Controller before Piwik 2.7.0 the example will look slightly different.

  The controller action index assigns the view variable answerToLife to the view and renders the Twig template templates/index.twig. Any variable assigned this way can then be used in the view using for example {{ answerToLife }}.

  Using a Twig template to generate the content of your page is actually optional : instead feel free to generate any content as desired and return a string in your controller action.

  As the above template index.twig is extending the dashboard template the Logo as well as the top menu will automatically appear on top of your content which is defined within the block content.

  

  How to display the page within the admin

  If you would like to add the admin menu on the left you have to modify the following parts :

  • Extend \Piwik\Plugin\ControllerAdmin instead of \Piwik\Plugin\Controller in the file Controller.php. In a future version of Piwik this step will be no longer neccessary, see #6151
  • Extend the template admin.twig instead of dashboard.twig
  • Define a headline using an H2-element

  {% extends 'admin.twig' %}
   
  {% block content %}
      <h2>Hello world!</h2>
      <br/>
   
      The answer to life is {{ answerToLife }}
  {% endblock %}
  Télécharger

  Note : Often one needs to add a page to the admin to make a plugin configurable. We have a unified solution for this using the Settings API.

  

  How to display a blank page

  If you would like to generate a blank page that shows only your content the template should contain only your markup as follows :

  <strong>Hello world!</strong>
  <br/>
   
  The answer to life is {{ answerToLife }}
  Télécharger

  Predefined variables, UI components, security and accessing query parameters

  In this blog post we only cover the basics to get you started. We highly recommend to read the MVC guide on our developer pages which covers some of those advanced topics. For instance you might be wondering how to securely access $_GET or $_POST parameters, you might want to restrict the content of your page depending on a user role, and much more.

  If you would like to know how to make use of JavaScript, CSS and Less have a look at our Working with Piwik’s UI guide.

  Note : How to include existing UI components such as a site selector or a date selector will be covered in a future blog post. Also, there are default variables assigned to the view depending on the context. A list of those variables that may or may not be defined is unfortunately not available yet but we will catch up on this.

  Let’s add a menu item to make the page accessible

  So far you have created a page but you can still not access it. Therefore we need to add a menu item to one of the Piwik menus. We start by using the Piwik Console to create a menu template :

  ./console generate:menu

  The command will ask you to enter the name of the plugin the menu should belong to. I will use again the above chosen plugin name “MyControllerPlugin”. There should now be a file plugins/MyControllerPlugin/Menu.php which contains an example to get you started easily :

  Menu.php

  class Menu extends \Piwik\Plugin\Menu
  {
      public function configureUserMenu(MenuUser $menu)
      {
          // reuse an existing category. 
          $menu->addManageItem('My User Item', $this->urlForAction('showList'));
   
          // or create a custom category
          $menu->addItem('My Custom Category', 'My User Item', $this->urlForDefaultAction());
      }
  }
  Télécharger

  This is only a part of the generated template since all the examples of the different menus are similar. You can add items to four menus :

  • configureReportingMenu To add a new item to the reporting menu which includes all the reports like “Actions” and “Visitors”.
  • configureAdminMenu To add a new item to the admin menu which includes items like “User settings” and “Websites”.
  • configureTopMenu To add a new item to the top menu which includes items like “All Websites” and “Logout”.
  • configureUserMenu To add a new item to the user menu which is accessible when clicking on the username on the top right.

  In this blog post we will add a new item to the user menu and to do so we adjust the generated template like this :

  class Menu extends \Piwik\Plugin\Menu
  {
      public function configureUserMenu(MenuUser $menu)
      {
          $menu->addManageItem('My User Item', $this->urlForAction($method = 'index'), $orderId = 30);
      }
  }
  Télécharger

  That’s it. This will add a menu item named “My User Item” to the “Manage” section of the user menu. When a user chooses the menu item, the “index” method of your controller will be executed and your previously created page will be first rendered and then displayed. Optionally, you can define an order to influence the position of the menu item within the manage section. Following this example you can add an item to any menu for any action. I think you get the point !

  

  Note : In Piwik 2.6.0 and before the above example would look like this :

  class Menu extends \Piwik\Plugin\Menu
  {
      public function configureUserMenu(MenuUser $menu)
      {
          $menu->addManageItem('My User Item', array($module = 'MyControllerPlugin', $action = 'index'), $orderId = 30);
      }
  }
  Télécharger

  How to test a page

  After you have created your page you are surely wondering how to test it. A controller should be usually very simple as it is only the connector between model and view. Therefore, we do usually not create unit or integration test for controllers and for the view less than ever. Instead we would create a UI test that takes a screenshot of your page and compares it with an expected screenshot. Luckily, there is already a section UI tests in our Automated tests guide.

  Publishing your Plugin on the Marketplace

  In case you want to share your page with other Piwik users you can do this by pushing your plugin to a public GitHub repository and creating a tag. Easy as that. Read more about how to distribute a plugin.

  Advanced features

  Isn’t it easy to create a page ? We never even created a file ! Of course, based on our API design principle “The complexity of our API should never exceed the complexity of your use case.” you can accomplish more if you want : You can make use of Vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, AngularJS, Less and CSS, you can reuse UI components, you can access query parameters and much more.

  Would you like to know more about this ? Go to our MVC (Model-View-Controller) and Working with Piwik’s UI guides in the Piwik Developer Zone.

  If you have any feedback regarding our APIs or our guides in the Developer Zone feel free to send it to us.

• How to add new pages and menu items to Piwik – Introducing the Piwik Platform

  11 septembre 2014, par Thomas Steur — Development

  This is the next post of our blog series where we introduce the capabilities of the Piwik platform (our previous post was How to create a widget). This time you’ll learn how to extend Piwik by adding new pages and menu items. For this tutorial you will need to have basic knowledge of PHP and optionally of Twig which is the template engine we use.

  What can be displayed in a page ?

  To make it short : You can display any corporate related content, key metrics, news, help pages, custom reports, contact details, information about your server, forms to manage any data and anything else.

  Getting started

  In this series of posts, we assume that you have already set up your development environment. If not, visit the Piwik Developer Zone where you’ll find the tutorial Setting up Piwik.

  To summarize the things you have to do to get setup :

  • Install Piwik (for instance via git).
  • Activate the developer mode : ./console development:enable --full.
  • Generate a plugin : ./console generate:plugin --name="MyControllerPlugin". There should now be a folder plugins/MyControllerPlugin.
  • And activate the created plugin under Settings => Plugins.

  Let’s start creating a page

  We start by using the Piwik Console to create a new page :

  ./console generate:controller

  The command will ask you to enter the name of the plugin the controller should belong to. I will simply use the above chosen plugin name “MyControllerPlugin”. There should now be two files plugins/MyControllerPlugin/Controller.php and plugins/MyControllerPlugin/templates/index.twig which both already contain an example to get you started easily :

  Controller.php

  class Controller extends \Piwik\Plugin\Controller
  {
      public function index()
      {
          return $this->renderTemplate('index', array(
               'answerToLife' => 42
          ));
      }
  }
  Télécharger

  and templates/index.twig

  {% extends 'dashboard.twig' %}
   
  {% block content %}
      <strong>Hello world!</strong>
      <br/>
   
      The answer to life is {{ answerToLife }}
  {% endblock %}
  Télécharger

  Note : If you are generating the Controller before Piwik 2.7.0 the example will look slightly different.

  The controller action index assigns the view variable answerToLife to the view and renders the Twig template templates/index.twig. Any variable assigned this way can then be used in the view using for example {{ answerToLife }}.

  Using a Twig template to generate the content of your page is actually optional : instead feel free to generate any content as desired and return a string in your controller action.

  As the above template index.twig is extending the dashboard template the Logo as well as the top menu will automatically appear on top of your content which is defined within the block content.

  

  How to display the page within the admin

  If you would like to add the admin menu on the left you have to modify the following parts :

  • Extend \Piwik\Plugin\ControllerAdmin instead of \Piwik\Plugin\Controller in the file Controller.php. In a future version of Piwik this step will be no longer neccessary, see #6151
  • Extend the template admin.twig instead of dashboard.twig
  • Define a headline using an H2-element

  {% extends 'admin.twig' %}
   
  {% block content %}
      <h2>Hello world!</h2>
      <br/>
   
      The answer to life is {{ answerToLife }}
  {% endblock %}
  Télécharger

  Note : Often one needs to add a page to the admin to make a plugin configurable. We have a unified solution for this using the Settings API.

  

  How to display a blank page

  If you would like to generate a blank page that shows only your content the template should contain only your markup as follows :

  <strong>Hello world!</strong>
  <br/>
   
  The answer to life is {{ answerToLife }}
  Télécharger

  Predefined variables, UI components, security and accessing query parameters

  In this blog post we only cover the basics to get you started. We highly recommend to read the MVC guide on our developer pages which covers some of those advanced topics. For instance you might be wondering how to securely access $_GET or $_POST parameters, you might want to restrict the content of your page depending on a user role, and much more.

  If you would like to know how to make use of JavaScript, CSS and Less have a look at our Working with Piwik’s UI guide.

  Note : How to include existing UI components such as a site selector or a date selector will be covered in a future blog post. Also, there are default variables assigned to the view depending on the context. A list of those variables that may or may not be defined is unfortunately not available yet but we will catch up on this.

  Let’s add a menu item to make the page accessible

  So far you have created a page but you can still not access it. Therefore we need to add a menu item to one of the Piwik menus. We start by using the Piwik Console to create a menu template :

  ./console generate:menu

  The command will ask you to enter the name of the plugin the menu should belong to. I will use again the above chosen plugin name “MyControllerPlugin”. There should now be a file plugins/MyControllerPlugin/Menu.php which contains an example to get you started easily :

  Menu.php

  class Menu extends \Piwik\Plugin\Menu
  {
      public function configureUserMenu(MenuUser $menu)
      {
          // reuse an existing category. 
          $menu->addManageItem('My User Item', $this->urlForAction('showList'));
   
          // or create a custom category
          $menu->addItem('My Custom Category', 'My User Item', $this->urlForDefaultAction());
      }
  }
  Télécharger

  This is only a part of the generated template since all the examples of the different menus are similar. You can add items to four menus :

  • configureReportingMenu To add a new item to the reporting menu which includes all the reports like “Actions” and “Visitors”.
  • configureAdminMenu To add a new item to the admin menu which includes items like “User settings” and “Websites”.
  • configureTopMenu To add a new item to the top menu which includes items like “All Websites” and “Logout”.
  • configureUserMenu To add a new item to the user menu which is accessible when clicking on the username on the top right.

  In this blog post we will add a new item to the user menu and to do so we adjust the generated template like this :

  class Menu extends \Piwik\Plugin\Menu
  {
      public function configureUserMenu(MenuUser $menu)
      {
          $menu->addManageItem('My User Item', $this->urlForAction($method = 'index'), $orderId = 30);
      }
  }
  Télécharger

  That’s it. This will add a menu item named “My User Item” to the “Manage” section of the user menu. When a user chooses the menu item, the “index” method of your controller will be executed and your previously created page will be first rendered and then displayed. Optionally, you can define an order to influence the position of the menu item within the manage section. Following this example you can add an item to any menu for any action. I think you get the point !

  

  Note : In Piwik 2.6.0 and before the above example would look like this :

  class Menu extends \Piwik\Plugin\Menu
  {
      public function configureUserMenu(MenuUser $menu)
      {
          $menu->addManageItem('My User Item', array($module = 'MyControllerPlugin', $action = 'index'), $orderId = 30);
      }
  }
  Télécharger

  How to test a page

  After you have created your page you are surely wondering how to test it. A controller should be usually very simple as it is only the connector between model and view. Therefore, we do usually not create unit or integration test for controllers and for the view less than ever. Instead we would create a UI test that takes a screenshot of your page and compares it with an expected screenshot. Luckily, there is already a section UI tests in our Automated tests guide.

  Publishing your Plugin on the Marketplace

  In case you want to share your page with other Piwik users you can do this by pushing your plugin to a public GitHub repository and creating a tag. Easy as that. Read more about how to distribute a plugin.

  Advanced features

  Isn’t it easy to create a page ? We never even created a file ! Of course, based on our API design principle “The complexity of our API should never exceed the complexity of your use case.” you can accomplish more if you want : You can make use of Vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, AngularJS, Less and CSS, you can reuse UI components, you can access query parameters and much more.

  Would you like to know more about this ? Go to our MVC (Model-View-Controller) and Working with Piwik’s UI guides in the Piwik Developer Zone.

  If you have any feedback regarding our APIs or our guides in the Developer Zone feel free to send it to us.

• What is a Cohort Report ? A Beginner’s Guide to Cohort Analysis

  3 janvier 2024, par Erin

  Handling your user data as a single mass of numbers is rarely conducive to figuring out meaningful patterns you can use to improve your marketing campaigns.

  A cohort report (or cohort analysis) can help you quickly break down that larger audience into sequential segments and contrast and compare based on various metrics. As such, it is a great tool for unlocking more granular trends and insights — for example, identifying patterns in engagement and conversions based on the date users first interacted with your site.

  In this guide, we explain the basics of the cohort report and the best way to set one up to get the most out of it.

  What is a cohort report ?

  In a cohort report, you divide a data set into groups based on certain criteria — typically a time-based cohort metric like first purchase date — and then analyse the data across those segments, looking for patterns.

  Date-based cohort analysis is the most common approach, often creating cohorts based on the day a user completed a particular action — signed up, purchased something or visited your website. Depending on the metric you choose to measure (like return visits), the cohort report might look something like this :

  

  Note that this is not a universal benchmark or anything of the sort. The above is a theoretical cohort analysis based on app users who downloaded the app, tracking and comparing the retention rates as the days go by. 

  The benchmarks will be drastically different depending on the metric you’re measuring and the basis for your cohorts. For example, if you’re measuring returning visitor rates among first-time visitors to your website, expect single-digit percentages even on the second day.

  Your industry will also greatly affect what you consider positive in a cohort report. For example, if you’re a subscription SaaS, you’d expect high continued usage rates over the first week. If you sell office supplies to companies, much less so.

  What is an example of a cohort ?

  As we just mentioned, a typical cohort analysis separates users or customers by the date they first interacted with your business — in this case, they downloaded your app. Within that larger analysis, the users who downloaded it on May 3 represent a single cohort.

  

  In this case, we’ve chosen behaviour and time — the app download day — to separate the user base into cohorts. That means every specific day denotes a specific cohort within the analysis.

  Diving deeper into an individual cohort may be a good idea for important holidays or promotional events like Black Friday.

  Of course, cohorts don’t have to be based on specific behaviour within certain periods. You can also create cohorts based on other dimensions :

  • Transactional data — revenue per user
  • Churn data — date of churn
  • Behavioural cohort — based on actions taken on your website, app or e-commerce store, like the number of sessions per user or specific product pages visited
  • Acquisition cohort — which channel referred the user or customer

  For more information on different cohort types, read our in-depth guide on cohort analysis.

  How to create a cohort report (and make sense of it)

  Matomo makes it easy to view and analyse different cohorts (without the privacy and legal implications of using Google Analytics).

  Here are a few different ways to set up a cohort report in Matomo, starting with our built-in cohorts report.

  Cohort reports

  With Matomo, cohort reports are automatically compiled based on the first visit date. The default metric is the percentage of returning visitors.

  

  Changing the settings allows you to create multiple variations of cohort analysis reports.

  Break down cohorts by different metrics

  The percentage of returning visits can be valuable if you’re trying to improve early engagement in a SaaS app onboarding process. But it’s far from your only option.

  You can also compare performance by conversion, revenue, bounce rate, actions per visit, average session duration or other metrics.

  

  Change the time and scope of your cohort analysis

  Splitting up cohorts by single days may be useless if you don’t have a high volume of users or visitors. If the average cohort size is only a few users, you won’t be able to identify reliable patterns. 

  Matomo lets you set any time period to create your cohort analysis report. Instead of the most recent days, you can create cohorts by week, month, year or custom date ranges. 

  

  Cohort sizes will depend on your customer base. Make sure each cohort is large enough to encapsulate all the customers in that cohort and not so small that you have insignificant cohorts of only a few customers. Choose a date range that gives you that without scaling it too far so you can’t identify any seasonal trends.

  Cohort analysis can be a great tool if you’ve recently changed your marketing, product offering or onboarding. Set the data range to weekly and look for any impact in conversions and revenue after the changes.

  Using the “compare to” feature, you can also do month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter or any custom date range comparisons. This approach can help you get a rough overview of your campaign’s long-term progress without doing any in-depth analysis.

  You can also use the same approach to compare different holiday seasons against each other.

  If you want to combine time cohorts with segmentation, you can run cohort reports for different subsets of visitors instead of all visitors. This can lead to actionable insights like adjusting weekend or specific seasonal promotions to improve conversion rates.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

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  Easily create custom cohort reports beyond the time dimension

  If you want to split your audience into cohorts by focusing on something other than time, you will need to create a custom report and choose another dimension. In Matomo, you can choose from a wide range of cohort metrics, including referrers, e-commerce signals like viewed product or product category, form submissions and more.

  

  Then, you can create a simple table-based report with all the insights you need by choosing the metrics you want to see. For example, you could choose average visit duration, bounce rate and other usage metrics.

  

  If you want more revenue-focused insights, add metrics like conversions, add-to-cart and other e-commerce events.

  Custom reports make it easy to create cohort reports for almost any dimension. You can use any metric within demographic and behavioural analytics to create a cohort. (You can explore the complete list of our possible segmentation metrics.)

  We cover different types of custom reports (and ideas for specific marketing campaigns) in our guide on custom segmentation.

  Create your first cohort report and gain better insights into your visitors

  Cohort reports can help you identify trends and the impact of short-term marketing efforts like events and promotions.

  With Matomo cohort reports you have the power to create complex custom reports for various cohorts and segments. 

  If you’re looking for a powerful, easy-to-use web analytics solution that gives you 100% accurate data without compromising your users’ privacy, Matomo is a great fit. Get started with a 21-day free trial today. No credit card required. 

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