Besides having a nearly unpronounceable name, Piwik stands to be one of the best self-hosted alternatives to Google Analytics.

Well, sir, Google Analytics does just about everything... why would anyone want an alternative?

If you are asking this question then you probably will not be interested in Piwik. If you're still reading, then there are several reasons why one might want something besides Google Analytics.

They are severely paranoid in the style of Jerry Fletcher or Fox Mulder. Since Analytics is hosted by Google, you are sending potentially private information to a third party. Either you're afraid it will get intercepted in transmission or worse, you think Google is going to use it against you or sell it to your competitors. While these fears are unfounded, trying to reason with a conspiracy theorist is irrational.

They receive more than 5 million pageviews a month and don't want to bother with an AdWords account. While I have never dealt with a site that even approaches this Google Analytics limit, it seems like overcoming it is a simple matter of setting up an AdWords account with a budget of $1/day. With that many visitors, I sure hope you're making enough to afford $30 a month.

They have special needs that Google Analytics just doesn't meet. Okay, fair enough. Piwik is open source and extendable. This means if you need a special feature, it's relatively easy to build it or find someone to do it for you. While I can't think of too many special needs cases, they most certainly exist.

They're a data-head and want to analyze the raw information. Also a fair reason. While Google does give you access to their API from which you can extract large amounts of data, it is limited. Piwik stores all the data on your own server, so you can access it a lot easier and in a larger volume than Google offers.

They just like trying new shiny things. This one is the best fit for me.

So Piwik may or may not be for the average user. If you are still reading, then you probably want to know a little more about it.

It is an open source, self hosted web analytics software package that runs on PHP with MySQL, utilizing the typical Javascript tag to track visitors. Every website should be running some form of web analytics. It is not an invasion of privacy. It is very difficult, bordering on impossible to identify personal information from this. Everything is anonymous.

Monitoring your website traffic gives you the opportunity to identify

How visitors find your website

How they interact with it

How they ultimately make a profitable decision (a conversion)

More importantly, using this information gives you the knowledge you need to react to your visitors. It is this unique ability to understand and react to your visitors that makes Internet marketing so effective.

Installing and setting up Piwik should take only 5 minutes. You upload the package to your server, establish some file permission settings, give it database access, and install the tracking code. This does require a moderate comfortability with some administrative and technical tasks, so contact 2HelixTech if you want some help setting up Analytics.

I have found that Piwik runs slightly faster than does Google Analytics. Sometimes GA gives me trouble with some pages not loading fast or taking several minutes. This has not been a problem with Piwik on my modest server. However, I imagine these times take a noticeable dive with high traffic sites.

The functionality is very clean compared to GA. Ironically, Google's Analytics interface breaks its typical style of clean and simple raw functionality. Piwik takes a little getting used to after using GA for so long. The navigation is along the top and the information is presented in slightly different formats.

I am still exploring and learning about Piwik, but there are several things that I find wicked cool with it. One is the tag cloud visualization that you can see on several pages. You can see this on their online demo. This is a fun new way of visualizing different metrics. If you like diving into how specific visitors interact with your website, you can do this with the visitor log. This is akin to analyzing your server logs, although in a much more visually appealing format. Another feature that is potentially useful is the visitor generator. This allows you to dynamically generate fake visitors to your website - hopefully not in order to fool your boss or client!

That being said, Google Analytics still outshines Piwik in features and most likely always will. The first thing that comes to mind is the newly improved In-Page Analytics. However, even GA falls way behind the market leader for click tracking (check out CrazyEgg), so this is not a huge loss. I expect to see GA's In-Page tracking launch another huge improvement within the next year. Although there might be an existing plugin, or at least the potential for one, Piwik doesn't seem to integrate with Google AdWords. This may be the deal breaker for some users. Power Google Analytics users will miss custom reports and segments, custom variables, and weighted sorting.

One of the biggest places that Piwik seems to be lacking even for the average Analytics user is the ability to do time comparisons of traffic. It's great if my visitors are trending upwards this week or month, but I want to know how that compares to the same time period a year ago.

If anyone from Piwik or a power user wants to prove me wrong on some of these comparisons to GA, I look forward to it.

Overall, Piwik is a great open source Google Analytics alternative for the overly paranoid, special needs cases, and tool addicts.