I Googled "Alternatives to Google Analytics" and Discovered Piwik

Website metrics tools enable organizations to understand their audiences’ online experiences, and leverage insights to achieve strategic goals.

Google Analytics is the towering giant in the web-measurement-technology space, dwarfing all global competitors. Even so, a dynamic marketplace is teeming with solutions, both established and emerging, some claiming new customers while others struggle for relevance.

Multiple Davids, One Goliath. Below is a glimpse of market share among the world’s top 20 providers. Ranked a distant second, Yandex.Metrika is a search engine and analytics platform in Russia; it also has a toehold in the United States (W3Techs, 2016). For the remainder of this post, we will explore another web-analytics solution: the seventh-ranked yet respectable Piwik. The company’s objective is straightforward: “Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics” (Piwik, 2016).

(Source: W3Techs)

About Piwik. Piwik, pronounced pee-wick, is a website analytics company that was founded by developer Matthieu Aubrey in Great Britain in 2007 (Piwik, 2016). As of this writing, Piwik has nearly 1 million global users and is available in 50+ languages. Its largest set of customers is in the United States, followed by Germany and Great Britain. In the past five years, Piwik has peeled away more than 15,000 users from Google Analytics (Built With, 2016). Although this is a small relative number for Google, it is a win for Piwik, especially considering that Piwik’s stated objective is to be a viable alternative to the dominant analytics provider.

Points of Differentiation. Piwik is a free, open-source technology, meaning that its source code is available to developers, to collaboratively modify and share. Because the technology is self-hosted on each customer’s server, data is owned by the customer and not shared with third parties (unlike Google Analytics). And since the business owns the data, their customers’ privacy can be ensured; Piwik’s solution is also EU Cookie law-compliant (Piwik, 2016[2]). As Pikwik notes:

"Privacy on the Internet is a major concern for many users…We spend so much time online that access to our Internet activity logs (websites, pages visited, internet searches) can reveal a lot of personal information… 

"When you use a web analytics tool such as Google Universal Analytics, your web analytics data is tracked, stored and owned by [Google]...They also re-use the visitor log data tracked on your website to enrich existing profiles for a given user or IP address."

Privacy is especially important when when an organization handles sensitive information. Piwik claims that allowing organizations to remain sole owners of their data has made Piwik popular among governments, healthcare, and other organizations dealing with confidential information (Piwik, 2016[3]). A more extensive comparison of Piwik and Google Analytics features appears at the end of this post.

Setup. The free version of Piwik requires an understanding of server specifications and intermediate technical knowledge to install it properly. By comparison, cloud-based Google Analytics is quicker and easier to set up.

Dashboard. In general, Piwik offers many of the same basic metrics as Google Analytics. The tool provides stats on Visitors, their Actions, and Referrers. Below is an image of Piwik’s Dashboard Overview page with Visitors presented in real time in the left column, a graph of trends in the center, a high-level breakout of visit characteristics and actions, and on the right: a geo-location map and referrers. 

And here are the sidebar menu items at the left of the page, expanded. A fourth menu provides reporting for Goals, once they are set up.

Aesthetics and Functionality. One issue I have with Piwik’s presentation is its lack of information hierarchy. Google Analytics’ (GA) off-the-shelf design is easily readable, using scale to indicate summary data vs. details. The Visitor overview dashboards in Piwik and Google Analytics illustrate this point.

GA also offers the convenience of selecting comparison metrics from the overview page, and provides more click-through data than Piwik. Piwik does report on specific keywords though, topping Google Analytics in this regard.

In general, Piwik appears to be less robust in data and functionality, and not as customizable as Google Analytics – at least in the demo – especially with regard to filter criteria and segmentation options. Now it’s possible these features are available in the live platform or via Piwik’s plugins. But if Piwik wants to be competitive with GA, it could be advantageous to hardwire these options into the software, or indicate them as bonus plugins in the demo. Maybe it’s time for an updated, interactive demo.

A number of cool, free plugins expand Piwik’s functionality. Below are a few examples.

It’s true that Google Analytics also offers numerous free apps via its Technology Partners. A Solutions Gallery of user tools and shortcuts is also available, like Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor Awesomeness custom segments and reports.

Both Piwik and Google Analytics offer premium services geared for the scale and budgets of enterprises: Piwik PRO and Google Analytics 360.

Feature Comparison. Finally, here is a snapshot of some common features of Piwik and Google Analytics, and also instances where they diverge (Pikwik, 2016[4]).

Features (Free)	Piwik	Google Analytics
100% data ownership, access	Y	N
User-level data	Y	Can create w/coding
Unlimited hits/month	Y	N
Unlimited properties to track	Y	N
Real-time reporting	Y	Y
Un-sampled reporting	Y	N
Do-not-track visitor preferences	Y	N
Unlimited user accounts per login	Y	N
Unlimited data storage time period	Y	N
Unlimited data export	Y	N
Multiple data export formats	Y	Email or PDF only
Funnel analytics	N	Y
Attribution	N	Y
Report scheduling and distribution	Y	Y
Unlimited number of goals	Y	N
Mobile app	Y	Y
Help Center and support forums	Y	Y
Tracks Google Adwords and Display ads	Y	Y (native)
Templates	N	Y
Graph annotations	Y	Y
Training and support	Y	Y (excels)

If you are interested, here are more comprehensive lists of Piwik features and Google Analytics features.

Conclusion. So can Piwik compete with Google Analytics? What tool is better? With its plentiful assortment of features and a simple interface, Piwik may be a good choice for web-analytics beginners. However, setting up a log-analytics tool requires some technical expertise; this could be a barrier to adoption. By contrast, Google Analytics is easier to set up and has more sophisticated reporting. But because of its sprawling dimensions, segmentation, campaign goals and other capabilities, it is presumably more difficult to use. In either case, training, guides, support, and user forums are readily accessible and common to both solutions.

Final Thought. Before installing Piwik or another analytics tool, it could be wise to take a step back. Consider dipping into analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik’s book, Web Analytics 2.0 and browsing his website, Occam’s Razor before downloading a single file. Pay special attention to Mr. Kaushik’s seminal Digital Marketing and Measurement Model. These resources are an excellent place to start, providing vital context and structure before you embark on your web analytics journey.

References

Built With. (2016). Piwik web analytics customers. Built With. Retrieved from https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Piwik-Web-Analytics/Market-Share

Piwik. (2016). New to Piwik: What is Piwik? Piwik. Retrieved from https://piwik.org/faq/new-to-piwik/faq_13/

Piwik. (2016[2]). Log Analytics. Piwik. Retrieved from https://piwik.org/log-analytics/

Piwik. (2016[3]). White Paper: Piwk vs. Google Analytics – The ultimate guide to choosing the right web-analytics tool. Piwik. Retrieved from https://piwik.pro/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/PIWIK_vs_Google_Analytics_Whitepaper.pdf

Piwik. (2016[4]). Infographic: Piwk vs. Google Analytics – The in-depth comparison. Piwik. Retrieved from https://piwik.pro/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/piwik-ga.jpg

W3Techs. (2016, November 7). Market share yearly trends for traffic analysis tools for websites. W3Techs. Retrieved from https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/traffic_analysis/ms/y