The website has become a very common way of presenting information today. Whether it's for selling, blogging or for an application, we have our reasons for wanting to create a website. However, creating a website is only the first step in a long process to make your website reach its true potential. Analysis of its traffic is one of the steps of the process and in the following we will show you how you can do it while being master of your analysis data.

Analysis of traffic on the website

Indeed, once your website is online, it is imperative for you to analyse its traffic. You have two main reasons for wanting to do this:

• For information: it is imperative for you to know what is the state of traffic on your website, as this lets you know what level of consultation your website has on the internet. You can, depending on the purpose of the website, know the number of unique visitors and visitors, how many times a video has been seen, how many pages are seen per day, and so on. This information allows you to get an idea of the popularity of your website.
• To take actions: once you have knowledge of the popularity of your website, you may be required to take actions to improve it. For example, you can campaign on social networks, in forums, by email. Analysing traffic to your site can allow you to measure the success of these actions and make adjustments if this does not have the desired effect.

All these analyse will not be done manually: you have to rely on tools. In the area of web traffic analysis, the most widely used tool on the market today is Google Analytic (what Google does not own 😀). However, Google Analytic does not give you control over your data. All your data is stored on Google's servers and you only have access to the results of analysis of this data. But no panic there is another solution, solution with which you have absolute control over your data: Piwik .

Piwik: open-source analysis platform

Piwik is the leading open-source analytics platform that gives you more than just a powerful analytics tool

It is the leader in analyzing open source website traffic and has functionality similar to Google Analytics. However, here are some reasons that will motivate you to choose Piwik:

• Free and open source software : source code is available to anyone who wants to know what's going on behind it and contributed to its improvement.
• You have absolute control over your data With Piwik you are the master of your site's analysis data. Because we are in an era where having data is power, I think this is a very good reason to choose this solution.
• User privacy protection You can analyse visitors' traffic to your website while protecting their private lives. This can be very useful in cases of constraints with the legislation in force.
• Customizable and extensible : Piwik is followed by a large community that offers a wide range of extensions. You can configure it to suit your needs.

Piwik is a very good alternative to Google Analytics and has very advanced analytic capabilities. However, there are other web site traffic analysis tools that you can look at: here is an article that might help you make your choice: https://campaign.piwik.pro/web-analytics-vendors-comparison/