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Comment on Goodbye Google Analytics. Hello Piwik

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Piwik is pretty good alternative and unlike GA, it gives instant analytics and is extensible.

However, it tends to behave clunky after some time, depending on the number of sites, traffic and server where you host it. This is most visible when you try to display a larger date range or just dig in the history.

There is one more important thing to consider: it collects IP addresses of all your visitors out of the box, which might be in conflict with your local laws. Be sure to check that out before adding it to the site.

You can get Google analytics to show you real time info too, it just don't save it as the default view.

I've found that with GA the previous 24 hrs or so stats are not really accurate, especially with bigger traffic sites.

I think they use sampling once your traffic gets to a certain size, so though they report figures down to individual hits, it's not actually as accurate as that might imply.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

Yes, it uses sampling. And the numbers might be way of. We had times, with stats fluctuating 40% if I look at the numbers from yesterday and compare them to the numbers taken more then 48h after the fact.

Thanks for that; I remember that it used to display only data older than 24h, but didn't know they changed that.

The GA real-time view does really work well now, but I think I'll have to give Piwik a try; looks like a fantastic alternative!

There is one more important thing to consider: it collects IP addresses of all your visitors out of the box, which might be in conflict with your local laws. Be sure to check that out before adding it to the site.

Is there an way to disable this?

Yes, you can anonymize the last octet of the IP address.

There are actually 3 settings in Settings -> Privacy:

  192.168.100.xxx 
  192.168.xxx.xxx (recommended)
  192.xxx.xxx.xxx
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