Afternoon,
Last week Matt installed Piwik on one of our servers so that
we could collect some rudimentary data from EPIC. After gathering a few days
of data we sat down and went through the Piwik stats compared to some older
Google Analytics stats. Here are some of my conclusions.
-
Piwik is very picky about the
version of PHP which it runs on. This became an issue as it requires 5.1.3,
whereas our servers use 5.1.2. This means that the Piwik Dashboard was only
running on his laptop. Getting this working on our server and having it secure
makes the webmasters uncomfortable.
-
In order to measure conversion [1] on
the site we would need to write some custom widgets / modules for Piwik that
would allow us to track these metrics specifically.
-
At this point in time I do not think
that Piwik is the right solution. Piwik shows promise and at some point in the we
may wish to revisit its use.
I think we need to have a further discussion on exactly how we measure conversions as mentioned in [1]. For example how do we measure a conversion for “Download a distro or build” does this mean that we use an exit page metric for anything on download.eclipse.org? What if that user continues to surf the site and exits through another page. Does that count as a conversion? What if a user performs multiple actions that constitute a conversion? Does that count as one or many?
Thoughts?
[1] - https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=228580
Nathan Gervais - nathan@xxxxxxxxxxx
Web Developer
The Eclipse Foundation