I'm not sure if I should use Piwik for my site... can anyone advise?

Support & Bugs
1

this is our situation :

  • I have a site where visitors can browse approx. 10.000 articles of approx. 25 journals.
  • an article URL is (more or less) of this form : article.php?article_id=123456789&journal_id=ABCD so both the journal and the article are passed for identification
  • visitors are either registered or not. This is NOT through a login procedure, but rather IP-address based. IP addresses will determine the registered-institution
  • if from a registered institution, users can download article contents. If not registered, they can only see abstracts
  • registration is on a journal_basis (so a visitor from ip-addres x.y.z.q might have access to PDF content of journal ABC, but only abstracts of journal XYZ)
  • users can download articles through payment if they are not from a registered institution (determined by ip). In that case, a pay-per-view service is handling this, and pings back to a fixed URL payment_completed.php?article_id=123456&journal_id=ABCD so I can identify valid purchases here

this is what we want to track :

  • statistics on the article-abstracts that were viewed
  • statistics on the article-PDFs that were viewed (only registered institutions)
  • statistics on the journals that were viewed
  • statistics on the journals that were viewed, filtered by institution (so that we can generate reports for ONE institution)
  • statistics on the institutions that visited the website, filtered by journal (so that we can generate reports for ONE journal)
  • statistics on the pay-per-view, with details on which articles

now the important thing is : we want reports FILTERED PER INSTITUTION, and FILTERED BY JOURNAL. So we will have institutions asking us “hey, can you send us the report for the past 3 months of our visits”, and we will have journal-editors asking us “hey, can you sent the report for the past 3 months of our visitors ?”. I really really really really want to automate this, and journals/institutions are NOT allowed to create the filters themselves… I don’t mind clicking a few times per report, but not 25 steps through the interface for each report…

this is how I THINK i should implemented it :

  • add tracking code to articles.php to report the number of articles that were viewed
  • add tracking code to download.php to report the number of pdfs that were download
  • add tracking code to payment_completed.php report the number of completed purchases
  • on all three, add a custom page variable for the journal_id
  • on all three, add a custom page variable for the article_id
  • on all three, add a custom page variable for the institution_id, if the visitor is from a registered ip-range (-1 if NOT registered)

is this correct ? Or should I use session custom variables rather than page variables ?

many thanks for any advice !

2

FILTERED PER INSTITUTION, and FILTERED BY JOURNAL
Use custom variables http://piwik.org/docs/custom-variables/
Along with segmentation: https://piwik.org/docs/analytics-api/segmentation/
(segmentation will be available in the UI in a later version)

is this correct ? Or should I use session custom variables rather than page variables ?
I haven’t brainstormed too much about it but it looks like you will do the right thing!

3

thank you very much for your reply !!

does Piwik support FAST reporting for this kind of thing ? Or will I have to make reports for 100+ institutions manually ? Is there a way to generate a report for each journal and instituion PROGRAMMATICALLY ?

thanks !

4

You can set the list of “Segment” to pre-process during the archive.php execution: How to Set up Auto-Archiving of Your Reports - Analytics Platform - Matomo

List of segment to pre-process is set in config/config.ini.php file: http://dev.piwik.org/trac/browser/trunk/config/global.ini.php#L358

5

Happy New Year! If you are still using Piwik and interested in the awesome new feature of “Creating a Custom Segment in Piwik and apply to reports in Real time!” we need YOUR help, with a little or big donation at: http://crowdfunding.piwik.org/custom-segments-editor/

This will allow to dynamically add or edit, a new set of rules for example “Show all visitors from USA and using Firefox and using Google”. This will be done via a simple to use interface. See screenshots and more info here: http://crowdfunding.piwik.org/custom-segments-editor/

We are crowd funding the future of Piwik and this feature in particular. With your help we can do it.

Thanks

Matthieu