Sankuru

I installed the Google Analytics (GA) tracking on a friend's website a few weeks ago. Even though GA reported the tracking software as being installed, it still has not started tracking since that time.

I raised a trouble ticket with the GA helpdesk a week ago, but I still have not received an answer as to why the tracking has not started. So, I went out there in the bush to find an alternative to GA.

By going through the site analytics category, I bumped into piwik analytics in the Joomla extension repository.

According to the piwik site, it aims to be an open-source alternative to Google Analytics.

Now, Google Analytics is not bad. But then again, the GA Helpdesk is obviously undermanned and overwhelmed. it must be indeed hard to provide quality support for free. I do not see what business model allows it, except for user community self-help forums.

Website analytics is a mission-critical service for website owners, who use it intensively to steer their marketing strategies and budgets, and to track their return on marketing campaigns. If the website analytics service goes titsup, it soon causes panic amongst website owners. In the case of Google Analytics, they will also have nobody to turn to, in order to fix the problem asap.

Google Analytics, as a free service, is not sufficiently well supported to cut it for the mission-critical need of  knowing what is going on, on the website.

Furthermore, the one size fits all approach of GA, will not suit the need of website owners, who will eventually start clamouring for their own specific customizations in an exactly-like-I-want-it style.

As a service provider to website owners, I can see their frustration growing with GA, as they -- with open wallets in their hands -- cannot have what they want, because Google Analytics simply will not do it or even allow it. As a service provider, I also see serious and missed opportunities to customize things for website owners who really want it or need it. Piwik can definitely be a solution to this problem.

Piwik has an elaborate extension mechanism, which supports installing, configuring, and customizing, additional plugins and widgets.

I can see the same pattern emerge as with Joomla and Virtuemart. First, the website owner installs mostly the standard version and goes live with that. As his business grows, and his experience with managing his web properties increases, he begins to develop precise and specific needs that outgrow that what can be configured out of the box, and finally calls in an A-team of customizers, such as ourselves :-)

In terms of functionality, Piwik should not just run after Google Analytics, and treat it as the one shining example to emulate.

Website analytics is just a subfield in the old and mature fields of Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehousing (DW).  There is no need to re-invent the wheel, when these fields have accumulated years of experience in solving the same problem. Google Analytics fails to provide support for otherwise typical BI and DW activities:

• data integration
• multidimensional drilldown
• data mining
• detailed and exception reporting
• user alerts and notifications

That is why the open-source packages Spango and Pentaho beat Google Analytics -- no sweat -- in terms of implementing serious and proven business intelligence methods. Unfortunately, these packages are not yet pre-configured to collect, analyze, and report on website traffic. There is definitely room in the market for a solution that uses such serious BI application as the basis for website analytics.

Unfortunately, these BI applications are quite old-fashioned and still sport desktop user interfaces -- which are a deployment and support hazard -- instead of offering lightweight web interfaces. They also very often still use fat, bloated, obese programming environments such as Java and C#, instead of using lightweight scripting language such as Perl, Php or Python. You will also notice that these traditional BI applications usually suffer from old-fashioned, kitchen-sink featuritis, instead of offering a well-designed extension mechanism, along with a repository of modules and plugins.

As a matter of fact, the technical architecture of the typical Business Intelligence application is not very Business Intelligent.

Piwik, indeed, runs circles around these traditional BI applications, in terms of ease of installation, deployment, support, configuration, customizability, extensibility, and availability of interesting extensions.

Therefore, I will keep test-running Piwik as an alternative to Google Analytics. My first impression is that Piwik is really good; and definitely has potential.

At the same time, however, I believe that a more general, open-source, Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing application, that truly supports the entire arsenal of BI methods, and which also has a good application architecture (in Piwik style) will eventually emerge, and become the true winner in its class.