In a digital world, Piwik gives you insights on your website’s visitors, your marketing campaigns and much more, so you can optimize your strategy and online experience of your visitors. Piwik is an open source alternative to Google Analytics available in 48 languages!
Piwik can be installed with one click via Softaculous.
1. Select a Date Range :
By default, Piwik will show data for ‘yesterday’. You can click on the calendar and select another date range to view reports. Piwik supports any day, week, month, year or custom date ranges. You can change the default date that loads in the reports in the User Settings.
2. A Look at a Piwik Report :
The report is displayed in various formats
- A simple table of just the main metric that the widget features
- A table with more metrics
- Goals information about this metric (if you are using goals)
- A bar chart (usually, hovering your mouse over the icon will give you the option of choosing other types of chart, for example pie charts or tag clouds)
- Export the data
- Save the graph as an image
- Configures the report’s data. Some reports can be “flattened”, or rows with low visits excluded.
You can experiment with clicking on these icons. You can easily go back to the original appearance by clicking the relevant icon. If you hover your mouse over any of these icons a tooltip will appear to remind you of what they do.
3. Dashboard & Widgets :
You can add new widgets to your Dashboard, to ensure it reports on all of your most important metrics. Click on the “Add a Widget” link: it will expand and you will see a list of categories. Run your mouse over the list and it will display a list of the individual widgets available. There are more than 30 in total. In the example below, the mouse hovers over Visitors and the top item on the list is “Visitor countries (world map)”.
- Click on the widget name to add it to the Dashboard. By default any new widget will appear in the top left of the Dashboard.
- Click and hold on the dark grey title bar to drag and drop the widget into a new position.
- You might not be interested in some of the default widgets; it’s easy to remove them from your Dashboard. Hover your mouse over that widget (anywhere within the gray outline box) and you will see a cross appear in the top right corner of the box. Click the cross, validate, and the widget will be removed from the Dashboard.
- You can also select a different Dashboard layout. You could, for example have a wider column on the left and 2 narrow columns on the right. There are several column layouts that you can choose from the “Dashboard & Widgets” menu.
4. Creating and customizing a new Dashboard :
Often, there are widgets we wish to see monthly or weekly, but others we must check daily. For this purpose and others, it is recommend to create Custom Dashboards. For example one could track in the default dashboard the sources of traffic (campaigns, websites, keywords) but have another dashboard with widdgets focusing more on the users behaviour (top pages, engagement, time on site) and Goals conversions. You can create new dashboard, reset dashboard to the default widget layout, rename dashboards, remove dashboards.
5. Graphs (Data Visualization) :
There are often several metrics that are relevant (visits, page views, bounce rate, conversions, revenue, timme on site, etc.). By default, graphs in Piwik will show the historical evolution of a given metric. You can also choose to plot on the graph a different metric to the default one. You can also plot several metrics at once, for example here we compare Ecommerce orders and Total Ecommerce revenue.
6. Inline help :
When a report title is hovered, a Help icon appears which will display a short description of the current report and the “freshness” of the report.
7. Flattening reports :
Several reports in Piwik can be organized in groups: Page URLs are grouped by directory name, Custom Variable values are grouped by name, a click on a Search Engine Keyword will display the list of search engines used. It is sometimes useful to “flatten” the table so as to compare all elements together.
8. Detailed historical report about any data point :
Piwik provides a very useful feature which they call “Row Evolution”. You can hover the mouse on any row, click on the little graph icon, and it will open a detailed view of the historical values for this specific row. You can also compare several rows together, for example to compare Browser market share over the last 30 months or compare the Mobile devices used.
Source : http://piwik.org