Piwik

As mentioned earlier, I'm planning to stop using Google services. There is no hurry, I move slow.

Today I left Google Analytics and moved to Piwik.

Installation

To use Piwik you have to:

  • create a database
  • deploy piwik to web server, run it, and configure it

Installation is well documented, and I had no problems with it at all.

Then I added JavaScripts snippets on my websites, and... well, it just worked!

The Piwik dashboards are really nice. It looks good, and is quite configurable.

Migration from Google Analytics

I found out that there is a tool to migrate data from Google Analytics into Piwik (see Google2Piwik).

When running Google2Piwik I had some problems with Google API. It turned out that Google needs some time (few minutes or so) to acknowledge the fact that I have turned Google Analytics API to ON (using APIs console). After few minutes passed everything was fine (no more "access not configured" errors).

The migration process takes a lot of time time! (long hours), which was quite surprising cause my sites are not so popular. But maybe it does not depend on popularity but rather on time range to migrate (in my case ~3 years).
What is worse, the migration process sometimes breaks with some cryptic message. This was rather nasty. The migration script could be definitely improved!

But in the end I was able to migrate the data.

Goodbye Google Analytics!

Piwik works fine for me. I can't compare its functionality to Google Analytics, because I use only the simplest data it offers (nb of visitors etc.). I do not perform any sophisticated analysis, so I can't tell you which one is better.

My website is definitely NOT the most popular site on the web. I can't predict how Piwik behaves under really heavy load. But it seems rather solid to me, so I would bet that it will work just fine. :)

 
 
 
This used to be my blog. I moved to http://tomek.kaczanowscy.pl long time ago.

 
 
 

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