[Koha] Use of Google Analytics and +1 on Koha website

[Peter Aronson]

For those of you who'd like to find a free, open-source, community-supported alternative to Google Analytics that offers essentially the same features without compromising on privacy, I'd like to recommend Piwik <http://piwik.org/>. I've been using it for more than a year now on several websites, and it's stable, helpful — in short, excellent.

Unlike with Google Analytics, Statcounter, Woopra and other comparable options, Piwik is entirely self-hosted and, as I understand it, does not share any data outside your organization. Here are a couple of excerpts from their privacy page <http://piwik.org/privacy/>:

"When you use a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics (GA) or Yahoo Analytics, your web analytics data is tracked, stored and owned by the company providing you with the free analytics service. While they provide an excellent service for free, they also re-use the visitor log data tracked on your website to enrich existing profiles for a given user or IP address."

"Piwik is the leading self-hosted, privacy compliant, decentralized, modern & Free (GPL License) web analytics platform, a building block of the free and open Internet. By using Piwik and configuring a few options as explained in this guide, you will ensure that all of your valuable information is private and owned by one person (you!) and that your website also, just as importantly, respects your visitors' privacy."

Piwik even offers an option for you to offer your visitors a way to opt out of analytics by clicking on a link. It's easy to set up and easy to use. It creates lots of reports, it's customizable… in a word, excellent.

-Peter