Geographical location resolution V Google Analytics

Hi Piwik forumers,

I have an aussie site Dog Walking & Pet Sitting Williamstown, Newport that I have just launched. With very limited budget I am using Joomla and Google analytics mainly because they are free.

I have fairly good familiarity with GA over the years, and they seem to make some good developments, however having stumbled across Piwik, it has piqued my interest.

Currently I dont have any Goals set on GA, since I dont sell any product. Perhaps i could set a goal for people sending emails on my contacts page, though not sure how well that works with a joomla ‘contact page form’ plug in I am using. Any ideas?

My main question here is what advantage does Piwik hold over GA with respect to Geographical resolution? GA used to show me map and download info down to suburb level, however now it very annoyingly only goes as granular as the whole city of Melbourne, 4M plus people! As I am a dog walker, I have a very localized business and knowing that my site is optimizing well and being picked up by searches in my immediate location is vital information. How granualar does Piwik go in this regards and does it do it with the standard application or do I need a plug in, and is the plug in robust and easy to install.

Thanks in advance,

B

Piwik in its raw installation does no geoip resolution. That requires the geoip plugin which is scheduled to be included in core in a later version.
As far as I know it does only lookup the ip up to the city level, which is what the (free) maxmind geoip database returns. Everything else would be mostly magic as ip addresses are not more specific (if at all).

Thanks thomas …

just wondering though … when i run an app to find my IP it shows my suburb location - i guess it goes to the last exchange I am connected to which is only 1 km away, using copper.

I get that some people will have dynamic IP addresses, but if they are using a computer from home, GA used to record the IP during the session, so it didnt matter if the IP changed next time they logged on, it would just give erroneous info regarding new visitor info etc.

So any idea why apps find it so hard to provide such info, when after-all, GA used to do it in earlier versions anyway, probably until privacy issues arised, which is rediculous as all it tells you is info about a user in a given suburb.

Does this make sense that suburb resolution should be part of the standard app then?

B