Over the past 2 months, my current employer has allowed me the opportunity to work with both Google Analytics and Omniture extensively. One of the tasks they (my employer) have entrusted me with is Site Conversion and Optimization. Having had experience with this before on much smaller sites, this is my first experience involving a major high-end content site with over 1 million indexed content pages and hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month. As you can imagine the task ahead of me is huge to say the least. I’m dealing with huge numbers across the board, where one minor change can be the difference of tens of thousands of dollars. Thankfully, I work with an IT and Marketing staff that are second to none that were smart enough to involve Google Analytics in their analytics strategies along with their Omniture platform. Over the past month I have been [...]

What if you could build your own Google Analytics program? What if instead of having to use a 3rd party service such as Google Analytics, I told you that you could host your own application and keep all your website statistical information private? That’s what Piwik is for! Piwik is an open source web analytics application written in PHP and MySQL that you can install and manage on your own web server. I literally just finished installing it 5 minutes ago on my Dreamhost server and it is working like a charm. Why would you want to do this? Well there are several reasons and benefits behind hosting your own analytics application. Let’s talk about a few of these. Reason #1: Your information is private. Keep it that way! Not that Google is interested in throwing your information around to the world or anything. But it’s nice, especially when you [...]