Analytics Tracking

I don't have experience with Piwik, but it looks like a fairly refined tool. @simonv3 would you say it is feature-equal to Google Analytics (GA)? Perhaps I'm naïve, but it's not like we'd be sending a Mixpanel level of detail (clicks, search queries, etc) to GA? I'm all for using something else as long as it doesn't impact our development time or make it harder for on-coming folks to figure out how to hook into it.

…perhaps something else to consider is what tools we may be using in the future that are more like mix-panel (if at all) for analyzing how people use the site, running split tests, etc. GA doesn't really provide these tools and it might make sense to choose an open-source solution that plays well with other more fine-grained analytics tracking tools.

@rickcarlino My issue with x-do-not-track is that it puts the burden on the user, rather then on the organization doing the tracking, which is problematic in and of itself I think. It's also something that users need to be educated about to be able to use (this is the same argument for say environmentally destructive factory farming - it shouldn't be up to the consumer to fix this by a) learning about it and b) boycotting it, it should just be a principle that the factory farmers adhere to like "don't be shitty").

In principle I think Piwik is better than Google Analytics.

In practice I have found using Piwik to be a frustrating experience.

If you value your values above functionality and ease of use I would say Piwik, but be aware it's not as polished or full featured as Analytics.

@samrossiter What about Piwik was frustrating? Setting up? Level of details? Etc.

I didn't set it up so I can't comment on that part.

I found it much more difficult to track user journey's through the site. Eg. 'X people who land on home page went off to page Y during July'

It's the flow reports I miss
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2519986?hl=en&ref_topic=2472754

I also found it difficult to compare reports over two time periods to look for trends. Eg. 'X people who land on home page went off to page Y during July, which was 10% more than during June'

There is a demo site here: https://demo.piwik.org

Actually just taken another look and it seems that Piwik does now have an equivalent of flow reports: http://piwik.org/docs/transitions/ so that criticism may no longer be valid.

Thanks for the insight, Sam. I think if someone wants to champion setting up Piwik, it would be really cool to have complete ownership/privacy/control of our analytics data. Any takers? If not, we'll probably just want to focus our dev time on actual OpenFarm features.