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• How to create a custom theme in Piwik – Introducing the Piwik Platform

  23 août 2014, par Thomas Steur — Development

  This is the start of a new blog series where we introduce the capabilities of the Piwik platform. You’ll learn how to write custom plugins & themes, how to use our HTTP APIs and more.

  We have been greatly simplifying our APIs over the last year focusing primarily on one design principle :

  The complexity of our API should never exceed the complexity of your use case.

  In other words, if you have a simple use for our API, we want it to be simple for you to accomplish it. If you have a complex, big, hairy, change-the-world idea, then maybe we can’t make it simple for you to accomplish it, but we want it to be possible.

  Over the next weeks and months you will learn what exactly we mean by this and how we accomplished it.

  FYI, don’t worry if you’re currently using our APIs, we keep them backwards compatible and we announce breaking changes in our platform changelog.

  Getting started

  In this series of posts, we assume that you have already set up your development environment. If not, visit the Piwik Developer Zone where you’ll find the tutorial Setting up Piwik.

  To summarize the things you have to do to get setup :

  • Install Piwik (for instance via git).
  • Activate the developer mode : ./console development:enable --full.
  • And if you want, generate some test data : ./console visitorgenerator:generate-visits --idsite=1 --limit-fake-visits=600. This can take a while and requires the VisitorGenerator plugin from the Marketplace.

  Let’s start creating our own theme

  We start by using the Piwik Console to create a blank theme :

  ./console generate:theme

  The command will ask you to enter a name, description and version number for your theme. I will simply use “CustomTheme” as the name of the theme. There should now be a folder plugins/CustomTheme which contains some files to get you started easily.

  Before we modify our theme, we have to activate it by visiting the Settings => Themes admin page in our Piwik installation, or alternatively by running the command ./console core:plugin activate YourCustomTheme. If the theme is not activated, we won’t see any changes.

  Theme Contents

  The most important files in our theme are plugins/CustomTheme/stylesheets/theme.less, plugins/CustomTheme/stylesheets/_colors.less and plugins/CustomTheme/stylesheets/_variables.less :

  • theme.less is the file that will be included when your theme is activated. In this file you would include other stylesheet files and overwrite CSS styles.
  • _colors.less contains many less variables allowing you to easily change the colors Piwik uses.
  • _variables.less contains currently only one variable to change the font family. More variables will be added in the future. Note : This is a new feature and the file will be only there in case you have installed Piwik using Git or at least Piwik 2.6.0.

  Changing the font family

  To change the font family simply overwrite the variable @theme-fontFamily-base: Verdana, sans-serif; in _variables.less. That’s it.

  Changing colors

  To change a color, uncomment the less variables of the colors you want to change in _colors.less. I will shortly explain some of them. Usually changing only these colors will be enough to adjust Piwik’s look to your corporate design or to create a look that pleases you :

  @theme-color-brand:                    #d4291f; // The Piwik red which is for instance used in the menu, it also defines the color of buttons, the little arrows and more
  
  @theme-color-brand-contrast:           #ffffff; // Contrast color to the Piwik red. Usually you need to change it only in case you define a light brand color. For instance to change the text color of buttons
  
  @theme-color-link:                     #1e93d1; // The link color which is usually a light blue
  
  
  
  @theme-color-widget-title-text:        #0d0d0d; // The text and background color of the header of a widget (Dashboard)
  
  @theme-color-widget-title-background:  #f2f2f2;
  
  
  
  @theme-color-menu-contrast-text:       #666666; // The text color of a menu item in the reporting sub menu and the admin menu
  
  @theme-color-menu-contrast-textActive: #0d0d0d; // The text color of an active menu item
  
  @theme-color-menu-contrast-background: #f2f2f2; // The background color of a menu item
  
  
  
  @graph-colors-data-series[1-8]:        #000000; // The different colors used in graphs

  Making the change visible

  To make a color or font change actually visible when you reload a page in Piwik you will have to delete the compiled CSS file after each change like this :

  rm tmp/assets/asset_manager_global_css.css

  Publishing your Theme on the Marketplace

  In case you want to share your theme with other Piwik users you can do this by pushing your theme to GitHub and creating a tag. Easy as that. Read more about how to distribute a theme.

  Advanced features

  Isn’t it easy to create a custom theme ? All we had to do is to change some less variables. We never even created a file ! Of course, based on our API design principle, you can accomplish more if you want. For instance, you can change icons, CSS stylesheets, templates and more.

  For further customising your Piwik, you can even change the logo and favicon in the Settings => General settings page.

  Would you like to know more about theming ? Go to our Theme guide in the Piwik Developer Zone.

  If you have any feedback regarding our APIs or our guides in the Developer Zone feel free to send it to us.

  PS : see also this related FAQ : How do I White Label Piwik ?

• 11 ways Piwik Analytics helps you to protect your visitors privacy

  11 janvier 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  At Piwik and at InnoCraft, we think Privacy matters. From the beginning, Piwik has had a strong focus on privacy and ensures the privacy of your visitors and analytics data. As a result, Piwik has been recommended as a privacy-compliant analytics tool for example by the Independent Center for Privacy Protection in Germany (ULD) and by the Center for Data Privacy Protection in France (CNIL). In France, Piwik is the only web analytics tool that does not require Cookie Consent.

  Here are some ways how you can ensure your users and visitors privacy by using Piwik.

  1. You own the data

  Whether you host Piwik on premise yourself, managed on premise by InnoCraft, or whether you use our Piwik cloud, when you use Piwik, YOU keep control of your data and nobody else. This also means you can decide where your data should be located physically.

  2. Anonymized IP addresses

  For better privacy by default, Piwik will not record the full IP address of your visitors because otherwise the browsing history could be easily tracked across several days and even across websites within the same Piwik server. Some countries even require to anonymize the IP address, considered Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

  To change the IP anonymization settings go to “Administration > Privacy”. Optionally, you can use the full IP to still get for example accurate location data.

  

  3. Delete old visitor logs

  The visitor logs contain information all the collected raw data about every visitor and every action. You can configure Piwik to automatically delete logs from the database. When you delete old logs, only the real time and visitor log reports will no longer work for this old time period, all other aggregated reports will still work.

  For privacy reasons, we highly recommend that you keep the detailed Piwik logs for only 3 to 6 months and delete older log data. This has one other nice side effect : it will free significant database space, which will, in turn, slightly increase performance !

  

  4. Support Do Not Track preference

  Do Not Track enables users to opt out of any tracking by websites they do not visit, including analytics services, advertising networks, and social platforms. By default, Piwik respects users preference and will not track visitors which have specified “I do not want to be tracked” in their web browsers. Get more information about DoNotTrack.

  To make sure Do Not Track is respected, go to “Administration => Privacy”.

  5. Include an Opt-Out Feature on your website or app

  By embedding the Opt-Out feature in your website, you give your visitors the possibility to opt-out of the tracking. When you go to “Administration > Privacy”, you will be able to copy and paste an HTML Iframe code to embed the opt-out feature for example into your privacy policy page or in your ‘Legal’ page. Your users can then click on a link to opt-out.

  On the Piwik Marketplace there are also some plugins available to customize the Opt-Out experience. For example AjaxOptOut and CustomOptOut.

  

  6. Disable Live features

  The Real-Time, Visitor Log and Visitor Profile features give you insights into the tracked raw data by showing you details about every visitor and every action they performed. To protect the privacy of your visitors you may decide to prevent access to such features by disabling the “Live” plugin in “Administration => Plugins”. This way only aggregated reports will be shown in your Piwik.

  7. Disable fingerprinting across websites

  By default, when one of your visitors visits several of your websites, Piwik will create a fingerprint for this user that will be different across the websites to increase the visitors’ privacy. You can make sure that this feature is disabled by going to “Administration => Config file” and verifying that the value of “enable_fingerprinting_across_websites” is set to zero.

  8. Disable tracking cookies

  Piwik uses cookies to store some information about visitors between visits. In some countries, the legislation requires websites to provide a way for users to opt-out of all tracking, in particular tracking cookies. You can disable cookies by adding one line in the Piwik Javascript code.

  9. Custom development

  Piwik is an open platform that lets you extend and customize the tracking, the reporting and the Piwik user interface to your needs and to protect your visitors’ privacy the way you want or need it. Learn more in the Piwik Developer Zone. You may also have a look at our Piwik Marketplace where you can find several free and premium features to extend your Piwik.

  10. Transparency

  By default, all information and all collected data in your Piwik server are protected and nobody can access it. However, Piwik allows you to optionally make your collected data public and you can export any Piwik report including the whole dashboard to embed it into your website. This way you can show your users exactly which information you track. When you decide to make reports public, we do our best to protect privacy and automatically hide any Personally Identifiable Information such as the Visitor Profile and we make sure to not show any Visitor IP address and the Visitor ID.

  11. Privacy policy

  When you use Piwik to track your visitors, we recommend to update your Privacy Policy to explain how Piwik is used and what data it gathers. We provide a Privacy Policy template for Piwik users that you can copy on your site.

  Continuous privacy improvements

  We are always interested in improving the privacy. If you miss any feature or have an idea on how to improve the privacy, please let us know.

  More information about all the Piwik features

  If you want to learn more about all the features in Piwik, have a look at our User Guides and FAQ entries.

• Tracking User Acquisition and Social Media Activity with Piwik

  25 avril 2017, par Florian Hieß — Community

  Being able to monitor user acquisition and social media activity is essential for determining whether the outcome of your campaigns is in line with the business objectives. Determining the source of each website visit that gets you closer to your business goals enables you to focus your efforts in the directions that are worth it. In this article you will learn why it is important to identify your traffic sources and how you can track user acquisition with Piwik Analytics.

  Why Is It Important to Identify Traffic Sources on Your Website ?

  Since brands nowadays use multiple channels for promotion and advertising, identifying the touch points and traffic sources of a lead or customer seems to become more and more difficult. And yet, this channel multiplication is what makes the source of a purchase more important. Once you identify the traffic origin and how each source is performing you are able to increase your efforts on the best performers, both in terms of human resources and monetary investments, to attract more leads or customers in these marketing channels.

  The default referrer types are defined by :

  • Search engine
  • Direct traffic
  • Websites and
  • Campaigns

  But consider that within the “Campaigns” type, each of the following referrers is a possible traffic source for your website and can be tracked with the Piwik URL builder :

  • Google AdWords
  • Display Ads, Banners
  • Links in Newsletters, Emailing
  • Affiliate links
  • Tweets
  • Facebook Ads

  Measure your performance and conversion

  With so many options, wouldn’t you like to know which one of them worked best ? To rate channels based on their performance, you first need to establish conversion goals and attribution.

  A conversion can be anything from sign-ups or downloads to leads, registered users and even paying customers. Define conversions based on what you want people to do once they’ve landed on your website.

  

  You need to define each conversion type in the Piwik dashboard, so that the analytics platform knows what to track. As far as attribution goes, Piwik by default links the conversion and attributes to the last seen (non-direct) referrer. You are able to change that to the first referrer in the attribution line by following the instructions in this conversion attribution FAQ.

  Track Your User Acquisition Right with Piwik

  Using the Piwik URL Builder tool, you can tag each URL you promote in your campaigns using relevant keywords. Provided that your URLs are tagged, whenever someone clicks on them, the campaign will be listed as the referrer in the Piwik dashboard. Once you’ve generated trackable URLs, you can include them in your social media posts which could be planned and scheduled using a social media management tool such as Swat.io.

  

  Campaign URLs work wonders for telling which campaign helped you reach your goals faster, more efficiently and so on but they do have a downside. They only work for URLs that you’ve shared. If someone decides to share a link of yours on social media they won’t be tagged beforehands. This is where the Referrers section of Piwik comes in handy, as it acts as a backup for tracking traffic sources. The overview tab features a graph that can help you identify when spikes occurred.

  

  As well as a numerical representation of the main referrer categories for the selected time period.

  

  Switching from Overview to Websites & Social, you can see a graphical representation of the social networks acting as referrers. The visualization can be changed to bar graphs or table, and can be easily exported in various formats for reports.

  

  The websites list features not only the social referrers, but all of the websites generating visits to your website. With Piwik you should not have issues with referrer spam, as the Piwik core team has tackled this problem early on, as detailed in how to stop referrer spam. Our analytics spam blacklist is a public project on GitHub.

  

  Assuming that you’re relying only on Facebook and VK.com for your campaigns, as the above screenshot would suggest, you might want to give paid advertising a try on these two social networks. Paid ads can increase reach and engagement, can get more relevant visitors to your website and can have a snowball effect in a short period of time.

  What Social Networks Can Piwik Track ?

  Piwik’s built-in social network list is quite extensive, as it currently features 70 platforms. The entries range from popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to more obscure ones such as Renren. However, this list is not available by default, and to see it or alter it, you would need a third-party plugin.

  How Does the Referrers Manager Plugin for Piwik Work ?

  The Referrers Manager plugin for Piwik provides access to the list of search engines and social networks that this analytics platform can handle by default. The simple plugin can come in handy when sorting out referrers. First of all, it displays a list of all search engines and social networks that Piwik can handle by default. Secondly, it enables users to disable/enable the platform’s default social network list. And using Referrers Manager, you can add custom engines or social networks to the referrers list in case they’re not already available.

  

  Conclusions

  Piwik is a very capable analytics platform as it is, but combined with third-party plugins such as Referrers Manager, it can provide even better insights on where your visitors are coming from. Remember to correlate the referrers with goals in order to determine which website or social network performs best in your context. And don’t forget to assign a monetary revenue value to each goal, in order to determine your social media ROI with greater accuracy.