Piwik in the WordPress dashboard: Web analysis directly in the CMS

Piwik is a web tracking programme that analyses 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 programme 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 programme 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.

In 2009, the plugin published for the first time in version 0.2.0 under the name WP-Piwik – this was the first publicly accessible Piwik extension for WordPress. André Bräkling (the author of the plugin) announced in mid-2015 that the developer team had succeeded in offering WP-Piwik as a complete integration of the web analytics tool for WordPress. Users of the extension were now given a variety of features and analysis options — with Piwik for WordPress, you have access to the following functions in the dashboard:

• Statistics on individual WordPress website traffic:
  • Geographic location of users and time of day for page visits
  • Information about the operating system, the browser (in addition to the provider, which plugins are activated during the site access are also noted), and the user’s type of device (whether a desktop, tablet, or smartphone was used)
  • Visitor source (was the website accessed via a link or with the input of the address into the browser’s URL bar?)
  • Executed actions of the user on the website (which links were clicked on, which areas of the site were scrolled through, etc.)
  • Retention time of website visitors
  • World map, showing where all website visitors are located in real time
  • With the “Row Evolution” function, you can choose certain categories from the collected data and compare their development over a freely definable period of time
• E-commerce tracking: Documentation of various actions from online shop visitors (orders, shopping cart updates, product and category page views).
• Set and analyse goals in connection with the website: Downloading particular files, subscribing to a user account or a newsletter, or accessing a particular web page or video, can all be tracked, among other actions.
• Information on the speed of website file transfers: How quickly is the website’s content presented to the visitor?
• Usage analysis of the internal website search function: Evaluation of the search terms used by visitors in the website’s internal search mask, as well as the general usage of the search function.
• Comment function: Comments (i.e., statistics, analysis results, and changes to a website) can easily be retained using the comment function.

To link your site to Piwik, you need access to the web server of the internet presence that you want to analyse with web tracking. To be able to use Piwik in the WordPress dashboard, you first need to set the programme up on the web server that is linked to your WP site. The installation of the programme really is quite straight forward:

1. Use the download programme for the official Piwik site.
2. Unpack the ZIP file.
3. Download the unzipped directory to your server completely in binary mode via an FTP client. It’s recommendable to create a new Piwik folder at this interval.
4. On the server, you can place Piwik in a subfolder of your website (Example: example.com/piwik) — or give the programme its own subdomain (Example: piwik.example.com).
5. Access the appropriate your website’s Piwik domain that you created in step 4 in the web browser. An assistant will now lead you through the installation process.
6. After the installation assistant has evaluated your system requirements, it will request the required information about your database. It’s a good idea to create a new database for Piwik on your host. Piwik requires a MySQL or MariaDB database.
7. Now enter the website that you wish to have analysed using Piwik (you can add other websites later).
8. A code is now displayed. This is a so-called tracking code. It can track the behaviour of visitors on a website that it’s linked with. It is, therefore, very important when it comes to web analysis. To evaluate your entire website with Piwik, copy the tracking code into every website of your online presence. If you use a content management system, then it’s generally sufficient to enter this code once in the footer section of the template before the final body tag. Your site is now linked with Piwik and can be analysed by the tool.

If you want to connect Piwik to your WordPress site, it’s easiest to use the WP-Piwik extension (the official Piwik plugin for WordPress). With this, you can automatically integrate the Piwik code into WordPress, replacing step 8 from the process explained above. To do this, perform the following steps after installing Piwik:

1. Log in to WordPress.
2. Go to the “Plugins” menu and search for “WP-Piwik”. Install this and activate it.
3. In WordPress, click on the tab “Settings” à “WP-Piwik”. Enter the Piwik domain of your website under “Piwik URL”. In the next field, enter your Auth Token. You can find the Auth code by accessing your Piwik domain and looking under the “API” menu tab in the personal settings. Once you’ve entered the URL and Auth Token in WordPress, apply the changes.
4. Now switch to the “Activate tracking” tab in the WP-Piwik settings, change the tracking code in “Standard tracking” and save.
5. Go back to the “Connect with Piwik” tab. Untick the box next to auto-configuration and apply the changes. Now you can click on your website in the “Select site” menu tab.
6. After you have selected your website and saved these changes, your WordPress is equipped with Piwik. Now you can access the tool either via the WordPress dashboard or simply using the Piwik directory of your website in the browser.