Piwik Analytics Interview Questions & Answers

Question 1. How Is A "visit" Defined In Piwik?

Answer :

• If a visitor comes to your website for the first time, or if he visits a page (or downloads a file) more than 30 minutes after his last page view, this will be recorded as a new visit. A Unique Visitor can make multiple Visits per day.
• In the first visit, the visitor is a New Visitor. From the second visit (the same day or later), a Unique Visitor is a Returning Visitor.
• You can change the 30 minutes value (session timeout) by overriding.

Question 2. What Is The "super User" In Piwik?

Answer :

Super Users are the only users that can perform all administrative tasks such as adding new websites to monitor, adding users, changing user permissions, activating and deactivating plugins and even installing new plugins from the Marketplace.

By default in Piwik there is one super user which was created during the installation process. As of Piwik 2.1, you may give Super User permission to other users.

Question 3. What Data Does Piwik Track?

Answer :

When you use the Piwik JavaScript Tracker Piwik will by default track the following information:

• User IP address (see also: IP anonymisation)
• Optional User ID
• Date and time of the request
• Title of the page being viewed (Page Title)
• URL of the page being viewed (Page URL)
• URL of the page that was viewed prior to the current page (Referrer URL)
• Screen resolution being used
• Time in local user?s timezone
• Files that were clicked and downloaded (Download).

Question 4. Does Piwik Support Ipv6 Protocol?

Answer :

Yes, Piwik works well with any IPv6 addresses. Here is further information:

• Tracking API will track users with an IPv6 address.
• Visitor Log and other detailed user reports will display IPv6 addresses.
• IP Anonymisation privacy feature will anonymise IPv6 addresses.
• Geolocating IPv6 does not work very well: most IPv6 will not be accurately geo located. A few Ipv6 addresses may be geo-located when using the PHP or Apache geo location driver. IPv6 geo location does not work with the source.

Question 5. Does The Piwik Tracking Tag Work On Https (ssl) Pages?

Answer :

To track your https pages correctly, your server hosting Piwik should work when called from https. You will need to buy a SSL certificate for your Piwik server.

Question 6. What Are "admin" Users In Case Of Piwik Analytics?

Answer :

You can create users and assign them the admin permission on a given set of websites. Users with the admin permission can edit the website settings (Name, URLs, Timezone, etc.). They can also grant other users the view or admin permission on the website(s) the user has admin permission.

Users with admin permission cannot add other websites and users, and they cannot manage plugins.

Question 7. What Is "page Title Not Defined" In The Page Titles Report, In Case Of Piwik Analytics?

Answer :

Piwik provides two reports for your page views: Page Titles and Page URLs. A page title is the content of the HTML <title> tag. If your pages do not define this <title> Piwik will instead report page title not defined for the visits on those pages.

We also highly recommend you use the latest version of the Javascript Tracking Tag in case you are still using the old Tracking tag.

Question 8. Is The Piwik Javascript Tracking Code Xhtml 1.0 Compatible?

Answer :

Yes, Piwik Javascript Tracking code is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Question 9. Which Console Tools Are Available In Piwik By Default?

Answer :

Piwik is an analytics platform that comes with a set of APIs (Tracking API and Reporting & Management API), a web application with a modern user interface, but Piwik also comes with a powerful console tool.

Question 10. What Is An "entry Page" In Case Of Piwik Analytics?

Answer :

For each Entry Page URL, Piwik reports the number of Entrances (Visits that started on this page), Bounces (Visits that started on this page but left the website straight away) and Bounce rate.

Question 11. In The Providers Report, What Does "unknown" Mean, In Case Of Piwik Analytics?

Answer :

Piwik uses a special php function (gethostbyaddr) to request the hostname associated to a given IP. For example, the function would return br76.comcast.net and Piwik would categorize the visitor as using the provider  Comcast. Sometimes however, for specific IPs or when the function times out, Piwik doesn't know which provider the visitor is using and will simply report Unknown.

Question 12. How Long Does The Piwik Archiving Process Take For High Traffic Websites?

Answer :

Piwik will run through the logs and compile all your reports for each day, week, month and year. How long the process will take depends on your traffic, number of visits and pages, on the number of websites you have setup in Piwik and of course on your server performance.

For example, using version 1.3 on a single core duo2 server with 3GB of ram, Piwik archiving process takes about 2 hours for 400,000 pages per day (and more than 6,000 websites). We are constantly improving Piwik performance.

Question 13. What Is An "exit Page" In Case Of Piwik Analytics?

Answer :

Piwik reports the top Exit Pages URLs, the number of Exits, Unique Pageviews and Exit Rate. Exit rate (sometimes called Page Exit Ratio) is the number of Exits from a page divided by total number of Page views of that page.

Question 14. What Is "page Url Not Defined" In The Pages Report, In Case Of Piwik Analytics?

Answer :

Piwik provides two reports for your page views: Page Titles and Page URLs. In some rare cases, a visitor's browser will not let the Piwik Tag request the current URL (generally for privacy reasons). If Piwik could not request the page URL from the browser, Piwik will instead report  page url not defined for the visits on those pages.

Question 15. How Does Piwik Detect Unique And Returning Visitors?

Answer :

When a visitor views a page or screen, Piwik will attempt to detect whether this request belongs to an existing visit, and/or whether the visitor has visited the website before. 

Question 16. What Is The "view" Permission In Piwik?

Answer :

The Super User can create users and assign them the view permission on a given set of websites. Users with the view permission can view all reports in Piwik for the website(s) the user is set to view. The user cannot add other users, websites, and they cannot manage plugins.

Question 17. What Other Free Software Projects Does The Piwik Team Create And Maintain?

Answer :

The Universal Device Detection library will parse any User Agent and detect the browser, operating system, device used (desktop, tablet, mobile, tv, cars, console, etc.), brand and model.

Question 18. How Many Custom Variables Can Set To Visitors And/or Page Views, In Case Of Piwik Analytics?

Answer :

Piwik custom variables tracking provides a powerful & easy way to track custom values and variables about your visits (for example Username, Membership level) or page views (eg. Category:Sport). You can track up to 5 variables for each Visit on your website. On top of these 5 custom variables for each visit you can also track up to 5 custom variables for each page view.

Question 19. Which Http Request Headers Are Used By Piwik?

Answer :

When measuring activity with the Piwik Tracking API, the following HTTP headers may be used:

• Host  the hostname of the HTTP request, the hostname of the Piwik server.
• Referer  used to track Referrer information such as website, search engine, social network.
• User-Agent  used to detect the information about browsers, operating system, devices by device-detector library.
• Cookie  when Opted-out from tracking, or when Third party cookies are used.Origin  used when cross-orig.