Hi there,
I am using Piwik for nearly a year now and I decided to give some feedback. Although I switched from Google Analytics/Reinvigorate/Getclicky to Piwik with all my projects, there are some things your competitors are better at or which could be optimised.
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Please allow changing super username and super user alias.
“Your username cannot be changed.”
“The Super User alias cannot be changed.” -
Why not add a database backup plugin?! Wordpress has a nice plugin called Database Backup which sends an email containing the Wordpress mysql database every x days. Maybe you can even add a mechanism which sends a database backup just before processing the automatic upgrade.
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When clicking on a Google referrer at Visitors → Visitor Log I am often not forwarded to the Google SERP but to my own page.
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I would love to see Piwik using my log files. Why not give Piwik access to my apache access.log to get more accurate data and even more data at all?
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I miss search engine bots detection. It would be great if Piwik recognised visits by Googlebot and Bingbot. Or other crawlers like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.
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When doing the automatic upgrade I get a checksum error for the file generateDoc.bat every time. Hoster and server do not matter.
/www/htdocs/xxxxxxx/piwik/misc/generateDoc.bat (expected size: 117, found: 115)
(There are no problems when using the BINARY mode.)
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Actions → pages: File export with sub pages open (+) does not show sub pages in the created csv/tsv ect. file
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Actions --> pages: I want to sort pages not only by directory views but also by single page views. As far as I see there is no way to quickly find out the single page with most unique page views.
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Actions → pages: Average time - I prefer the Google Analytics time format (00:01:03) because it’s easier to compare times (Piwik formats: 1 minute 3s and 34s)
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Reinvigorate’s “Referred Searches” seems to work much better than Piwik’s “Visitors → Visitors”. Example from one of my projects: Piwik shows 10 search engine referrers while Piwik only shows 2. (Okay, this won’t help you, but just for information)
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Visitors → Overview is a bit confusing. When choosing Week, Month or Year, Piwik shows weekly, monthly or yearly visitors. When choosing “Date range”, Piwik shows daily visitors for that range which is not 100 percent consistent.
I would expect to see the daily visitors for a certain month when selecting Month as period. Google Analytics works this way. It always shows the number of daily visitors regardless what date range you chose. -
Referrers: I miss on overview list containing all visits with referrers: search enginges, websites and campaigns. (Visitors → Visitor Log is not exactly what I am looking for as it also contains many direct entries.)
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Visitors → Settings → Browsers: It needs a lot of time to get through this list. It would be nice if I could completely expand this list with just one click.
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Visitors → Settings → Browsers: [Simple Table] Please also show browser usage in percentage. Not just in visits.
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Reinvigorate has a nice daily traffic summary. Maybe you can add this under Visitors → Overview and as widget for the home page.
http://img802.imageshack.us/img802/9211/daily1.png
In my eyes Google’s visitors page is also great:
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/908/daily2.png
- I wish Piwik had better and more detailed setting pages. Reinvigorate offers detailed pages for visitors settings. I think, giving a browser summary first …
http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/772/piwikbrowserversionsumm.png
… and then details for every sinlge browser …
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/3222/piwikbrowserfirefoxdeta.png
is a great way to quickly get and compare a lot of information.
Try to quickly find out what percentage of all Internet Explorer users still use version 6.0. Piwik does not let you know.
Two more examples. Reinvigorate’s resolution summary:
http://img848.imageshack.us/img848/9339/piwikscreen.png
IMHO Reinvigorate shows information better than Piwik because you see a piechart and a table at the same time. Therefore you can compare values much faster than when having only on item of data visualisation. Also, in Reinvigorate’s list you not just see visits but also percentage.
Reinvigorate offers details for every browser which you won’t find in Piwik. Here it’s a browser version list sorted by market share:
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/3250/piwikimorebowsers.png
- Updating piwik needs a lot of time. Setting folder and files permission to 777 for all piwik files takes Filezilla about 4 minutes. Later on you have do chmod folders back to 755 and files to 644 which takes another 4 minutes. Doing this for 5 projects takes 40 minutes.
Maybe you can use this feedback to make Piwik even better. Thanks for your great work!