Website analytics is one of the most crucial tools for webmasters; they provide insight for the number of unique visitors, page views, Bounce rate, visitors’ location, visitors’ path (entry and exit pages) and more. All of these information help the webmaster better understand the website users and how to better serve them.
There’re many website analytics solutions available; Google Analytics, StatCounter, AWStats are three of the most commonly used website analytics solutions but each one comes with its own drawback. Piwik is open source website analytics software that’s very accurate, very easy to install and use and gives the webmaster a detailed overview about the website analytics. This post will present a step by step guide on how to create your own website analytics service using Piwik and Openshift, without further ado let’s go to the steps:
Ingredients
- A free Openshift account, just go toOpenshiftwebsite and register using your email, no credit card is required.
Steps
- After registering; go to Openshift home page and click on the “MY APPS” on the top of the screen.
- You’ll be directed to your log-in window and enter your credentials, you’ll be directed to a new window click on the blue “Create your first application now” link.
- You’ll be directed to a window, select the “PHP 5.4” tab from the “PHP” menu.
- You’ll be directed to a new window, in the public URL; type the name of the project/application name (e.g. MyAwesomeAnalytics, Piwik, etc.) in the first space and the domain name (it’s not your real domain name, just any identification name e.g. AwesomeGuy/AwesomeGal) in the second space.
- Under the public URL, there’s the source code slot, just copy and paste the following link “https://github.com/openshift/piwik-openshift-quickstart.git” and it should like the screenshot below:
- Leave everything as it’s and click on “Create Application” tab at the end of the window.
- It will take a while then you’ll be directed to a new window, just click on the blue “Not now continue” link.
- You’ll be directed to a new window where you should add MySQL just by clicking the blue “MySQL” link.
- You’ll be directed to a new window, just click on the “Add Cartridge” tab.
- You shall be directed to anew window where you shall find all of your “MySQL” credentials.
- Now you’ll need to add phpMyAdmin; click on the blue “Add phpMyAdmin” located at the bottom of the same window.
- You’ll then be directed to a new window to confirm the addition of phpMyAdmin, just click on the “Add Cartridge” tab.
- You’ll be directed to the main window again and it’s time to go to your Piwik installation window, to do that simply click on the blue link at the top of the screen (that’s your URL).
- You’ll be directed to the Piwik installation window, just click on “Next”.
- You’ll be directed to a new window, it’ll check the status of some services, just click on “Next”.
- You’ll then be directed to a new window where you should provide your database credentials, there’s s small trick here which is getting your database server IP, the easiest way to do so is to return to your application and click on the small arrow at the phpMyAdmin tab.
- A new window will popup just copy the number shown in the below screenshot.
- Paste that number in the database server slot in the Piwik installation, then fill in the rest of the information from your database credentials that you can find in your application, then click next.
- You’ll be directed to anew window informing you that a table has been created successfully which means that everything is going fine will now, just click “Next”.
- You’ll then be directed to a new window where you should create a username, password and email address and then click on next.
- You’ll then be directed to a new window where you should fill your website’s name and address, just fill it and click next then you’ll be directed to a new window where you shall find the tracking code you should put on your website.
- You’ll then be directed to a new window, click on “Continue to Piwik” and you’ll be directed to Piwik login window, just fill in your credentials, and then you’ll be directed to the Piwik home page.
Now, you’ve a fully functional analytics system for your website that’s accurate, secure and free.
