Ditching Google Analytics for Piwik

August 5th, 2008 by Peter Glaeser | RSS feed for comments on this post | TrackBack URI

I’ve been using Google Analytics for about two years now. It’s a comprehensive improvement of the old Urchin tracker. The integration with Google AdWords is easy and gives a lot of insight. The product also gave the web analytics industry a big push and also played a role in the acquisition of Indextools by Yahoo.

However, I decided to remove Google Analytics from all my sites step-by-step. Why? Google won’t delete your websites’ data if you unsubscribe from Google Analytics. I hate data being collected and stored outside my sphere of influence. Using Google Analytics is like forwarding your server log files to your competition. I’d like to be in control of everything, especially when it comes to sensitive data.

As a Google Analytics alternative I’m using Piwik, an open-source web analytics package. It’s a free PHP/MySQL application that runs on standard LAMP servers. The front end consists of a fancy Ajax interface. The software also offers an API so that you can export data in a customized manner or put live statistics on your website. One Piwik installation can collect data for unlimited websites too. Seriously, it looks like Piwik is the way to go.

  1. 7 Responses to “Ditching Google Analytics for Piwik”

  2. By Carsten on Aug 5, 2008 | Reply

    Piwik is a nice piece of software. I use it since about 3 or 4 months for four of my sites. The functionality is not comparable with Analytics but it is enough, if you make no money with your site and just wanna check the normal user stats. But you should have a fast server! My Piwik MySQL database is now more than 66MB big, after such a short time…

  3. By Dennis on Aug 5, 2008 | Reply

    Transmitting ones own business data to a competitor is a very good argument against Google Analytics that seems to be plausible even for those guys who cannot be convinced by privacy arguments.

    Anyway, everyone should be aware that using Google Analytics is illegal under European data protection law (under almost any circumstances).

  4. By Priya on Jul 7, 2009 | Reply

    Is there any Java or .Net porting option available for Piwik? As I know there is nothing. Let me know if you know of any options?

  5. By Peter Glaeser on Jul 8, 2009 | Reply

    As far as I understand is Piwik based on OpenX which is a PHP application. So no Java or .NET.

  6. By Holger on Oct 21, 2009 | Reply

    Just a little correction. Piwik is afaik not based on OpenX, but a rewrite of phpMyVisites. However, there is a connection between Piwik and OpenX, as the lead developer seems to be working for OpenX and OpenX seems to be sponsoring the project somehow.

    And you are right: it is PHP based.

  7. By Wilson Parasiuk on Jul 27, 2010 | Reply

    somehow google-analytics has taken over my computer despite the fact that I have no website. I do not remeber ever subscribing to google-analytics. Yet every time i search anything on google search my search is redirected to google-analytics or to results5.google and the loading takes many minutes or it is not completed. I cannot find a way to unsubscribe. I have tried to phone google in California and in Canada , where I live, but I am get on the lne for hours at a time with no one answering. I am 67 years old and I feel that my privacy has been violated!Help please. Wilson Parasiuk

  8. By Peter Adams on Aug 19, 2010 | Reply

    You might also want to check out Open Web Analytics (http://www.openwebanalytics.com). It too is a PHP/MySQL alternative to Google Analytics but has some different features than Piwik including click Heatmaps and mouse recordings.

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