Piwik API & Platforms

This is actually various questions but they all come together to provide the analytics we need.

  1. We need to track search engine bots, came across the BotTracker plugin but it’s unclear whether we should install a separate Piwik instance to track the bots or keep them in the main visitor tracking.

  2. The BotTracker requires PHP-API but that appears to be just the Piwik API where you have to install PiwikTracker.php, but it’s not clear whether Advanced Image Tracker tracks bots and/or the HTTP Request does the same as you need to add &bot=1 to the request normally.

  3. We use WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, there are Piwik extensions for each but none say if they use the API or just inject javascript code, it’s a bit much to install all of them so a little surprised the information is not available.

We need to 1) track visitor numbers per site reliably; 2) track bot numbers per site reliably. We installed a second instance for bots and adding visitor js tracking and image bot tracking but it turns out the second still tracks the visitors even with the BotTracker, so the conclusion seems to be only one instance. I hope we don’t have to go back to the consultants and tell them this isn’t possible and they will have to custom code a solution, cannot believe no-one else needs this information to track SEO.