This post was last Updated on by Himanshu Tyagi to reflect the accuracy and up-to-date information on the page.
Piwik PRO is the best free alternative to Google Analytics that offers everyone a more privacy-friendly web analytics solution. While Google Analytics is a more widely-used web analytics solution, Piwik PRO looks promising and full of potential to replace Google Analytics in the longer run.
These days, more internet users are becoming more aware of their privacy rights and don’t want to be tracked without prior consent. According to a Gartner study, by 2023, 65% of the World’s population will have personal data covered under current privacy regulations. Piwik PRO ensures compliance with EU, Chinese, US, and Russian data protection laws, including GDPR and HIPAA.
This review will explore Piwik PRO and its new Core plan, a free version of this cloud-based web analytics and user behavior analysis tool. If you choose to opt for its paid version, you can also deploy it in a cloud, private cloud, or on-premise.
Additionally, we will also focus on whether how it does stack up against Google Analytics. So, if you are a marketer and looking for a new and innovative alternative to Google Analytics, read this review till the very end.
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Essential Features of Piwik PRO
Suppose you are using Google Analytics or used it in the past. In that case, you might be aware of the terms like users, sessions, goals, user behavior, and various types of reports to better understand users’ interests, demographics, and online behavior.
1. Simple yet effective and impressive online web analytics
If you have multiple properties, such as websites and apps, you can use Piwik PRO to track users and analyze their online behavior. Apart from that, it lets you keep a tab on critical KPIs such as bounce rate, average time spent, average pageviews, session counts, etc.
Along with these basic analytics metrics, you can analyze user behavior flow on your property. The user flow report is pretty similar to GA’s User Behavior flow report, allowing you to check how users navigate your property’s various pages or screens.
If you are a pro user and would like to track events such as downloads, external link clicks, then Piwik PRO makes it pretty straightforward. Additionally, you will also be able to create goals and measure the quality of traffic from various channels.
The only limitation here is the unavailability of a real-time report that GA offers and allows marketers to track users’ behavior in real-time. It also becomes critical when you are running paid social media or Google Ads campaigns.
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2. Enhance your product as per user’s engagement
Piwik PRO is more than just an analytics suite. It makes it easier for product teams to track product user experience and performance at every stage of the user’s life cycle. Be it publicly accessible pages or login areas. You will track users’ behavior without any issues.
Shape your product roadmap by making informed decisions by prioritizing bug fixes and adding new features. Piwik PRO lets you track users’ scroll, button clicks, video views, and form submissions to identify key usability issues.
Above all, integrate Piwik PRO with visualization and BI tools to gain meaningful insights and make the best decisions to create a delightful product audience for your users. Along with that, you can keep your user’s data safe with enterprise-grade privacy and security features.
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3. Consent Manager
Piwik PRO also offers a powerful and fully customizable consent manager. The best part is that it complies with the data privacy laws of various regions. For example, it supports Zero Load Cookie, which prevents tags from running before users consent.
What excites me the most is that it offers a swift opt-out mechanism to comply with CCPA and other privacy laws. Google Analytics doesn’t provide this feature at this moment. Thus, if you choose to go with Piwik PRO, you get an advanced consent management platform and web analytics and tags management.
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4. Tag management
With Piwik PRO, you also get a tag management solution that lets you focus more on data rather than worrying about tags. Easily create, debug, and deploy tags from various templates right in Piwik PRO’s Tag Manager.
All the data that you collect using tags stay where you put it. Above all, with the consent manager, you can ensure that the tags only fire when the users provide their consent.
Like Google Tag Manager, Piwik PRO Tag Manager provides a flexible and customizable data layer to add more information related to events and variables.
The best part is that there are enough resources on their website that walk you through creating, debugging, and deploying various types of tags.
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5. Single customer view
This feature of Piwik PRO has excited me the most because, in Google Analytics, you can’t import personally identifiable information. In Piwik PRO, you can collect, import, and analyze personal data without compromising data security and privacy.
There are multiple options for using your data – integrations, API connections, exports, and more. You can import data from various sources such as form submissions, marketing campaigns, custom events, etc.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you get a granular view of your users on Piwik PRO to help you make better decisions. HubSpot also offers users tracking on an individual basis, but that is a costly solution.
Note: This feature is not available in its free version. In the free version, you can only collect PII, but CDP is unavailable.
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Other Handy Features of Piwik PRO Core
- Custom reports and dashboards
- Forever free plan available
- 500,000 monthly actions and 14-month data retention
- It helps you comply with GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD
- Private cloud in selected geography (60+ locations or on-premises)
- Attribution modeling and behavior analytics
- Conversion tracking
- Campaign management
- Funnel analysis and data visualization
- Customer journey mapping, etc.
- Integration with Google Search Console and Google AdWords
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How to Get Started with Piwik PRO
Step 1: Integrating Piwik PRO
Visit the website and create your free account. After that, you will get the tracking code that you have to place right after the opening <body> tag. You can also use its plugin for smooth integration if you have a WordPress website, but I recommend adding it manually.
Note: The data will start appearing in an hour. Also, it will add a consent form on your website.
Step 2: Debugging
Click on the tracker debugger link to see if you have installed it properly or not. If everything is set up correctly, you will see traffic details such as which pages visited, external links clicked, time, etc.
Step 3: Start analyzing
Once you are up and ready, start exploring Piwik as it offers different types of reports such as Audience Overview, Session Log, Locations, Engagement, Campaigns, Internal Search, Downloads, etc.
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Verdict
Piwik PRO is a promising web analytics suite and the best free Google Analytics alternative for everyone. The Piwik PRO Analytics Suite is a comprehensive solution for all your web analytics requirements, from tracking essential KPIs to perform advanced analytics.
The best part is that it lets you take complete control over your first-party data with peace of security and compliance.
Do check it out, and I am sure you won’t regret it. I am already using it for one of my secondary websites. I require to import my users’ personal information for better tracking while maintaining much-required data security and users’ privacy.
