If you’re looking for detailed reports on your website visitors in real time, you must have a look at Piwik. This open source web analytics software will also provide the language they speak as well as keywords and search engines they used. It has a fully customizable dashboard, drag and drop widgets & dashboard , more than 40 languages available, and an open international community of more than 50,000 active users. It installs in 5 minutes and is ideal for med/high traffic sites.

If you manage one or more websites one of the best tools you can have available is one that analyzes incoming and outgoing traffic to your site and gathers metrics. It’s serious about providing fine-grain analytics of your website(s). If you aren’t interested in spending budget dollars and man hours getting a tool up and running, and need serious, real time analytics for your site, this is the way to go. After much researching and hearing from business colleagues, we are planning to use it on our family of websites very soon, and would highly recommend it to anyone who asks.

When it comes to web analytic services, one thing that makes Piwik stand out it its ability to provide data in real time, unlike it’s biggest competitor. As we all know, in the business world time is money so this is an outstanding feature. Just a couple of situations where real time traffic monitoring can come in handy would be: It would allow you to take measures to prevent your site from going down at times when you have traffic spikes. And, real time data allows you to track and analyze responses on social media sites like twitter and facebook.

Need more reasons to try this new gem? With Piwik you can store information on your own in-house server or a third party high up-time server for easier access. The information you receive is your own to work with and there are no limits to page views. Solutions for your needs are easier to find as well as Piwik has an active developer community of many people working to make Piwik do everything they want it to. The other perk to having this relationship network is the quick eradication of bugs and kinks along with a steady stream of improvements always coming in. Oh! And if you are curious about plugins, by default Piwik comes with more than 20 of those which are officially maintained.

So, if you are serious about managing your websites, Piwik is the way to go. With it you can check out who’s been visiting your page, why, when and even how. With it you can track conversion , set goals, create users with permission to view or administrate one or several websites, and track an unlimited number of websites. Safe to say that this software is out to exterminate it’s predecessor and seems to be achieving it’s goal. Piwik has been recognized with an award already with InfoWorld’s 2009 “Best of open source enterprise software”. Just another reason why we are planning on using piwik for all our websites because we are very impressed with it, and everyone else should also consider this tool. And the icing on the cake is that this cutting edge software won’t hurt your budget at all, as it is free. Happy tracking!