These past few months I’ve seen a rapid rise in the use of Piwik as a webanalytics solution. My clients are choosing Piwik as an alternative to paid solutions like ComScore Digital Analytix or free solutions like Google Analytics. Benefits include the data storage location, ownership of data and the ability to access non aggregate data.

Piwik stores clickstream data like visitors, visits and pageviews but is also able to store information like onsite search queries and eCommerce data. Data is stored within a MySQL database which can be hosted wherever you want giving you full control over data ownership and data storage location. I’ve seen implementations with over >100M interactions a year and I am currently working within an organization implementing a 50M interactions a year setup.

Analyzing the data gathered by Piwik can be done through their web interface which allows you to generate reports and segment the data, but as a Tableau enthusiast I was also curious if I could connect directly to the underlying MySQL database. It turns out you can! [Read more…]