Anyone use Piwik and Analytics simultaneously?

Hallo everyone,

I am curious whether anyone else has attempted to use Piwik and Google-Analytics simultaneously to cross-check stats, as I am about to. Currently I use the tracking parameter e.g. www.test-url.com?cp=test-kamp to track the success of campaigns, including adwords. The question is, whether Google-Analytics will also be able to read these parameters or not. Does anyone have experience with this? Google Support, as usual, are pretty useless in this matter...

Any tips or experiences from other Piwik users would be much appreciated!

Cheers
Barrie

Yes, I have done a simple comparison of numbers but not a trickier thing you want to do. My report is here: Piwik vs Google Analytics mismatch comparison

Hi byoussin,

your comparison sounds very interesting. Did you also compare download figures?
This is where I found the biggest difference in Piwik (I also compared the downloads in Piwik vs. AWStats as in your analysis on your website).

A little bit off-topic:
As I understood from your comparison, you relied on your server logs as being the most reliable source. Is there a reason for that? Because server logs can also be inaccurate, e.g.if your site is cached by providers, CDNs etc. Requests that are directed directly to the cached site won’t show up in your server logs.

If you use the JS tracking method for Piwik/Google Analytics caching is not the problem. But there are other sources of inaccuracy (visitors navigating away before the site is completely loaded etc.).

In your comparison, could you find for all page views in Piwik corresponding page views in your log (identified by a unique IP)?

Hi hulotte,

Thank you for this good point. However, I do not think this matters for my comparison since (1) I am not using CDN and (2) effects of provider caching should not show up at my level of traffic which is a few visits a day.

In my post I have argued that it is reasonable not to count such visitors as they found my pages irrelevant, and this is in agreement with the JS tracking method of Google Analytics and Piwik.

As I wrote in my post, I have been able to make correspondence between pages viewed according to Piwik Visitor Log, and pages viewed according to server log together with secondary files that included piwik tracking js code.
After excluding 7 pageviews which did not get to the Piwik js code, there was one pageview that Piwik misreported, and four pageviews that Piwik missed.
I reported these as bugs with full details:

Most of the problems arises with the sections like page views, bounce rate, counts, visitors visits etc. If you use JS tracking method for piwik & GA. Instead of that, Why dont you try Gostats. It might be helpful for you.

In 2.15.0 beta, we’ve fixed a big issue and now Piwik stats look much more like Google Analytics reports!

Feel free to try again installing with the latest 2.15.0 beta version which includes many fixes and improvements, see: I would like to test early beta and RC releases, how do I enable automatic updates to use these development versions? - Analytics Platform - Matomo

If you still have a problem, please create an issue on our tracker GitHub - matomo-org/piwik: Liberating Web Analytics. Star us on Github? +1. Matomo is the leading open alternative to Google Analytics that gives you full control over your data. Matomo lets you easily collect data from websites, apps & the IoT and visualise this data and extract insights. Privacy is built-in. We love Pull Requests!

Universal analytics.js can recognize different campaign tracking parameters other than the default
utm_source, utm_campaign, utm_medium, utm_term etc etc
via a plugin (campaign-loader.js)
Google Analytics Dev Docs - Campaign Loader Example

If using Adwords, Google Analytics also allows for configuration in the Property Settings page for -
Allow manual tagging (UTM values) to override auto-tagging (GCLID values)
(Select this option to allow your manual URL tagging to override AdWords auto-tagging.)

I have GA code on some of my sites.
But it dont use it.
I added that GA code a few years ago when my paid shared hosting service replied to me “Why arent you using Google Analitics like everyone else ?” after i ask him in a support ticket why was it so hard to use Piwik (all widgets loading indefinately) after that my hosting service was merged into this one.
For a long time, i was really sad that i couldn’t use Piwik any more.
Because, i really dont like Google Analytics, it doesn’t show me what i want to see, at least in the free version of the service.
I need the visitor log.
I’m fine with getting to others stats, but visitor log is more important to me than anyting.
I even dreamed of programing my own little stats software that would only have the visitor log and be more lightweight on the server.
But instead, i used an old computer, made a server out of it and installed Piwik on it.
Mostly work like a charm.
It’s connection might be unstable, getting 90% of the stats and been able to consult them is better than what i had.
Beside, as the years pass, Google is doing more and more bad stuff for alternate analytic solutions.
Knowing what the visitors typed in search engine to visit my sites was my second reason to use Piwik, and since 96% of my visits are now from “Undefined keyword”, i really feel sad.
Sure, all i have to do is go to my “Google Sitemap” account and all the data is there, but it’s a pain !
As a Gmail (in Thunderbird) and Android user, i can’t totally get rid Google, but sometimes i wish i could.
If only they would stop asking for a cell phone number, i dont even have one !
Sorry to deviate from the main purpose of the discussion here.