Hi Great Members of Digital Point! My first post...and I am glad to have found you, I have heard that it may not be in an affiliate marketers best interest to use google analytics, any truth to that? Also, I was looking at alternatives and found an open source site called Piwik....anyone using it? Thanks in advance, Todd
I've used Piwik and it's excellent, but GA is still the much better option. If you really don't want to rely only on GA, you can simply run both.
That's correct. Guru Greg Jacobs of Mage fame advises NEVER use google analytics if you are affiliate marketing. He has stats that prove it drops your page rank and traffic. Also other people in one of my support groups found that sites with keywords disappearing off the front page of google search quickly return as soon as analytics is removed. Not much that analytics can do that Piwik can't - and piwik has additional great features, all under your control Seems a no-brainer to me - why take the risk?
Piwik is great for live stats, but GA is better for reporting (daily, weekly, etc...) I use them both And seafrontsteve..you're being a bit paranoid. Google doesn't use that data for ranking...never believe an affiliate marketer
Google Analytics is best..... I really love to open analytics & track the visites to plan strategy to get more visits.
I have only used analytics but run it for both www.bostonluxere.com and for bostonluxere.com and sometimes there are slight discrepancies but I believe that has to do with both my developer logging in and changing stuff constantly and also by the way I have submitted it to website.
I wish GA had live stats - that is my only complaint. Remember, sometimes the paranoid are correct...
i'm using both. if you want detailed stats then go for GA. if you want simple and Sweet then go for Piwik BTW Piwik's County taking is not good, you have to install some plug-in which takes a lot of resource if you are on shared hosting.