FAQ Piwik

If you have a question for us at Piwik that has not been answered before, feel free to flick us an email at hello@piwik.org and we shall pop the answer up here for all to see. Thanks!

New to Piwik

  1. What is Piwik?
  2. How is Piwik different to Google Analytics and other web analytics tools?
  3. How does Piwik work?
  4. Is there an online demo available?
  5. Can Piwik manage multiple user accounts?
  6. How do I track several websites, domains and multiple subdomains in Piwik?
  7. How do I define and track Goal conversions?
  8. How do I track Ecommerce orders, details of purchased products and abandoned carts on my website?
  9. How does Piwik track downloads?
  10. What are Outlinks, Clicks or Unique clicks?
  11. How do I know when new versions are released?
  12. Where can I get support?
  13. Does Piwik track visitors without Javascript? Does Piwik track search engine bots or other spider / robots?
  14. Does Piwik track visits from Mobile devices (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Palm Pre, low end mobile phones, etc.)?
  15. Can I use Piwik and Google Analytics / Yahoo! Analytics / WebTrends etc. at the same time?
  16. Can I use Piwik and provide analytics Hosting service? What are the requirements for Piwik Hosted as a service?
  17. Can I rebrand or sell or reuse or re-license or include Piwik in my product, company, or website?
  18. Can I get the data from the Piwik API web services and publish, reuse, process this data in a non GPL software?
  19. How do I pronounce Piwik?
  20. Who is the team behind Piwik?

Installation

  1. How do I install Piwik?
  2. What are the requirements for installing Piwik?
  3. Can I use a database other than MySQL, like Postgresql, SQLite, Oracle?
  4. Do I need to create a MySQL database?
  5. How do I find out which version of PHP I have?
  6. My Web host supports PHP4 by default. How can I enable PHP5?
  7. Do I need to use PHP on my websites to use Piwik?
  8. Is Piwik compatible with Nginx?
  9. Is Piwik available as one click installation in cPanel, Softaculous, SimpleScripts, Webmin or other tools?
  10. Is Piwik compatible with Windows, IIS or Apache, or Microsoft Web Platform Installer?
  11. How do I configure Piwik when the server is installed behind a proxy?
  12. How can I reinstall Piwik? Can I keep the existing data?
  13. I want to migrate Piwik and move it to a new domain or a new subdomain, with the same MySQL server. How should I proceed?
  14. How can I move Piwik from one server to another, also migrating the data from one mysql server to another?

Update

  1. What version of Piwik do I have?
  2. What should I do when I want to update Piwik to the latest version?
  3. How do I backup my MySQL database?
  4. How do I restore my MySQL database?
  5. What should I do when the upgrade failed with "SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1142 INDEX command denied to user 'myUserID'@'SomeIP' for table 'SomePiwikTable'"

How to

  1. How do I make Piwik faster?
  2. How do I import Google Analytics data in Piwik?
  3. How do I exclude traffic from an IP or a range of IP addresses?
  4. How do I exclude query parameters from my reports?
  5. How do I set the time zone for my reports?
  6. How do I specify the currency used in the Goals revenue reports?
  7. How do I specify which websites to load by default in Piwik?
  8. How to specify the date used by default in Piwik reports?
  9. How do I control the categories tree structure in the Page URLs and Page titles reports?
  10. After the top 500 or top 1000 rows, Piwik automatically groups pages, keywords, websites, etc. under the label "Others"; How can I force Piwik to not limit the data?
  11. How do I force the reports to be re-processed from the logs?
  12. How do I force Piwik login to use SSL (https)?
  13. How to track error pages (404 pages) in Piwik? Which URLs are 404 and which referers lead to these pages?
  14. How do I track visits on my intranet?
  15. How do I automatically login my users in Piwik when they go from my CMS to Piwik?
  16. How do I enable users to login into Piwik inside an iframe?
  17. How do I delete all statistics for a given websites, or for all websites?
  18. How do I set some of my website directories or pages to not be tracked?
  19. How do I get reports for a custom date range?
  20. How do I change the default email address "From:" in PDF reports emails?
  21. How do I send Piwik emails using Gmail SMTP server?
  22. On a Windows server using IIS, the pages "Default.aspx" and "default.aspx" are tracked as different pages, but they are the same. How do I force Piwik to record them as the same page?
  23. How do I track my RSS/Atom feed subscribers?
  24. How do I momentarily disable Piwik User Interface and/or Piwik visitor Tracking?
  25. How do I enable "Unique Visitors" metric for Yearly reports and for Custom Date Ranges?
  26. How do I enable third party tracking cookies, as well as the existing first party cookies?
  27. How do I customize the Piwik Campaign parameters pk_campaign and pk_kwd?
  28. How do I configure outgoing (forward) proxy in Piwik (eg. squid)?

Plugins

  1. List of Piwik plugins
  2. How do I install a new plugin?
  3. How can I build a Piwik plugin?
  4. How do I report a bug in a plugin?

General

  1. Are Piwik reports real time?
  2. How is a 'unique visitor' counted in Piwik?
  3. How is a 'visit' defined in Piwik?
  4. What is an 'Entry page'?
  5. What is an 'Exit Page'?
  6. What is the 'super user' in Piwik?
  7. What is the 'admin' permission in Piwik?
  8. What is the 'view' permission in Piwik?
  9. What is the token_auth and where can I find this token to use in the API calls?
  10. Can I install Piwik on one server and track visits on websites that are hosted on other servers?
  11. How long does the Piwik archiving process take for high traffic websites - or hundreds of websites?
  12. Is the Piwik Javascript Tracking Code XHTML 1.0 compatible?
  13. Does the Piwik Tracking tag work on https (SSL) pages?
  14. Why are there sometimes 0 visits, but some conversions recorded, for example for a Keyword, a Website or a Custom Variable?
  15. Piwik attributes conversions to the last seen referrer by default. How do I credit conversions to the first referrer instead?
  16. A search engine is counted as a website referer. How can I add the search engine to Piwik?
  17. What is "page title not defined" in the Page titles report?
  18. What is "page url not defined" in the Pages report?
  19. In the Providers report, what does "IP" mean?
  20. How can I become an official Piwik Consultant?
  21. Can I help translate Piwik into my native language?
  22. Does Piwik support Google Analytics campaign parameters (utm_campaign, utm_medium, utm_source, utm_term)?
  23. What is a Product SKU in the Ecommerce Analytics report?
  24. When I enable "Purge old logs" in the Privacy settings, how do I ensure that all aggregate reports are processed so that I don't lose any historical report?

Troubleshooting

  1. Piwik doesn't track any visits and pages, and shows "There is no data for this report" in all reports.
  2. Visits from search engines or campaigns are not recorded, Piwik shows "There is no data for this report" for all Referrers reports.
  3. Piwik doesn't detect accurately the Country and/or Continent of my visitors.
  4. The graphs (pie chart, bar chart, evolution graph) are not showing in my Piwik.
  5. The sparklines (small graphs like ) are not showing in my Piwik.
  6. Statistics from Piwik and my other web analytics tool (log analyzer, webalizer or javascript based) are different, why?
  7. The Piwik Javascript code shows a red cross (on IE) or a broken image icon instead of the 1*1 transparent Pixel, what is the issue?
  8. How do I purge Piwik logs?
  9. I get the error message: "Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required XYZ in /path/piwik/XYZ.php on line X". How can I get Piwik to work?
  10. What should I do when I get the error message: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11)
  11. I get the error "Warning: gzuncompress() [function.gzuncompress]: data error" when looking at my Piwik reports.
  12. Piwik reports this error and fails: "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted (tried to allocate X bytes)". What should I do?
  13. Piwik reports this error and doesn't continue: "Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in ..."
  14. Piwik doesn't track Downloads and Outlinks on my website.
  15. How do I configure Piwik when mod_security is enabled?
  16. When I use http with force_ssl_login=1, I get "Too many redirects". When I use https, graphs on the Piwik dashboard are empty. I also can't export to CSV or view PDF reports.
  17. Emails sent from Piwik use the email address @defaultHostnameIfEmpty.example.org, how do I specify my domain name instead?
  18. I would like to import an existing Users database (login, password, emails) in Piwik, but the usernames and passwords are more permissive than what Piwik allows. How do I disable the checks on the Logins & Passwords?
  19. I'm a developer, how do I enable logging (and / or SQL profiling) in Piwik?
  20. Piwik doesn't show me when new updates are available, and the SEO plugin doesn't work.

Piwik and OpenX

  1. What is OpenX?
  2. What is the link between Piwik and OpenX?
  3. What does the OpenX ad server do?

Piwik and phpMyVisites

  1. What is Piwik?
  2. How is Piwik different to phpMyVisites?
  3. What is going to happen to phpMyVisites?

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