So maybe you don’t always like giving Google all of your data. Perhaps there are some things you’d like to keep to yourself, thank you very much. But what about Google Analytics. That shiny, shiny tool that tells you so much about yourself (well, particularly if you are a website of course).
Well enter Piwik, the open source alternative to Google Analytics.
Piwik is a downloadable, open source web analytics piece of software, with the ability to provide you with real time reports on your website visitors, search engines and keywords used, the language they speak, your popular pages, et cetera, et cetera. Written in PHP and using MySQL, Piwik gets installed on your own webserver and once installed will return a JavaScript tag which can then be used on any website that you wish to track.
What makes Piwik particularly nice is its flexibility. Built on top of a plugin-based framework, it is easily to extend or contract the system by simply removing plugins or perhaps creating your own. Added to this is the fact that all collected data is now hosted in a local database on your machine, meaning that you can use whatever open API you want to in order to grab the information, be it XML, JSON, CSV, whatever!
Naturally the user interface follows the current Web 2.0 example and features completely customisable, draggable interfaces, making it possible in other words to produce a solution tailored completely to your own needs.
In short, this is a great little project that is currently under active development and seems to be blazing through the awards for open source projects. Well worth a look, particularly if you are keen on moving away from Google Analytics and looking to tie in your analytics reports to your own platforms.
For more information about this project, hit the Related Link below.
Related Link: http://piwik.org/