Open Web Analytics (OWA) is an open source web analytics framework written in PHP. OWA was born out of the need for an open source framework that could be used to easily add web analytics features to web sites and applications. The OWA framework also comes with built-in support for popular web applications such as WordPress and MediaWiki. As a generic web analytics framework, OWA can be extended to track and analyze any web application.
Here are a few screens I took of OWA integrated into my WordPress admin panel. I have been using clickheat and piwik, but I may switch to this since it has both click tracking and analytics functions, along with many other features. Check out the screenshots (you’ll have to middle click to open in a new tab until i can find a js img box that works well with massive images):
Get/Learn more here:
http://wiki.openwebanalytics.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
There are a couple of benefits for running a single Piwik installation for multiple domains such as a single database, single install and easy tracking from a single control panel. We can also expect more accurate results because many people such as myself use NoScript and have it set up to automatically allow top level sites by default.
As more browsers start to wise up to XSS problems, we’ll all eventually have problems with external JS and by having our own analytics we stay a step ahead. The benefits of using your own tracking software rather than relying on the big G’s or others are obvious, but if you’d like to know more, be sure to check out Piwik’s site: http://piwik.org/
Now to the good stuff. It’s really an easy process, and this is just one of many ways you can do it:
Download and install Piwik to a folder outside your publicly accessible space.
Create symbolic links to each of your domains folders:
cd domain1/
ln -s ../piwik/ track
cd ../domain2/
ln -s ../piwik/ track
cd ../domain3/
ln -s ../piwik/ track
etc…
Add meta nofollow tags to the templates:
<meta NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" />
plugins/Login/templates
plugins/CoreHome/templates
And add it to piwik/robots.txt if you want:
#Disallow everything
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Disallow: /*
Disallow: */*
Disallow: *.*
Disallow: *
Disallow: .
Next you can log in to your Piwik install from any of your domains like this:
http://domain1.com/track/
Then you can add your site and it will create tracking code for the domain your are logged in from.
You can manage and view your data for any domain from any other domain since its a single installation.
