About a year ago, I wrote about piwik, a replacement for javascript based analytics tools like Google Analytics. I installed it on a couple of my sites, and have been watching it progress with regular updates. As of the latest version (0.6.3), they now have goals! To me, that is one of the key features of any analytics tool. Now you can have the analysis and not have to share it with anyone else (though you do have to update and maintain the software yourself, unless you use a site like My Free Web Stats).
After enabling the goal plugin, I set up a quick goal to track commenting on my blog (or at least if someone clicks the submit button on the comment form). The basic documentation on goal tracking doesn’t discuss how to do this, though it does cover url based tracking pretty well. A quick search turned up this page, which explains how to write the javascript to track a goal manually (which I then placed in an onclick handler). This bug post on goal tracking via links may be useful too.
I’m happy to see a well done open source alternative to analytics tools that lets you control your data. Piwik probably won’t be of interest to many people (most will just drop in Google Analytics and call it good), but for a few may be indispensible. And support for goals is a key part of the maturation of this project.
[tags]piwik,goals,opensource,analytics[/tags]