Piwik is a web tracking program that analyzes and statistically processes data about traffic on your website. After Google Analytics, it’s one of the most-used analysis tools for evaluating your internet presence. With Piwik, you get information about how often and from where your web presence is accessed, as well as how visitors behave while they are on your site. You’ll be able to see which subpages of your website were visited, when, and for how long. You will receive information on whether your guests reached you directly by entering the URL, or whether they found you via a search engine or by clicking on links and arriving via other websites. If your site was found using a search engine, you can also see which search terms visitors used. These statistics and others are made available by Piwik.
In addition, the tool can be used to check the extent to which certain defined goals of your website are being achieved. If for example, specific subpages are preferably accessed, special files downloaded, or user contact data transmitted (for example, for a newsletter), you can use Piwik to understand how often this happens and how successful your actions are. In addition to many other useful functions, the program also enables the automatic creation of reports on how your website is being used. As opposed to Google Analytics, Piwik gives you the possibility of installing the program on your own server and saving collected data on your own server (Google’s tool stores all of the data on the company’s servers, which is potentially critical in terms of data protection). This makes the tool an interesting alternative, especially for users who place a lot of worth on the security and full control of data.
The maker of the web tracking tool also offers a paid cloud version of the application with Piwik PRO, which gives users access to premium functions, support, customer service, and much more.