What is a Piwik PRO Action and What Does It Mean For My Business?

In a nutshell, a Piwik PRO action is your visitor’s activity as registered by your analytics platform. Even if your website is not an online store, it still counts as your online business card and can bring in some revenue.

Gathering data on your website, you can see which pages or sections your users are interested in, and this data may also support your offline leads efforts. This in turn can help you to improve your website, and eventually bring more business revenue. So let us have a look at the most popular Piwik PRO Actions and how they can help your business.

Whether your site has a few visits per day or a few million, all information is key when it comes to profitability. Piwik PRO can help you gather and analyse important information about your users of your website. With Piwik PRO action you can track Key Performance Indicators, such as visits, goal conversion rates, downloads, keywords and many more. There is also a possibility to adapt and expand your Piwik PRO functionalities by adding new plugins from the Piwik PRO Marketplace or the Piwik PRO premium features. An example of a useful Piwik PRO feature is Click Path, giving you an overview of the most popular page sequences that a user visited on their way to a defined Goal.

What is a Piwik PRO action?

An ‘Action’ is counted every time you track a visitor’s activity with Piwik PRO. There are a few things you should be aware of, when using Piwik PRO actions. Piwik PRO only tracks and logs visitors who have Javascript enabled. You can track visitors (or bots) who do not have Javascript available, by adding an Image Tracker to your pages. There are also advanced tracking techniques available in the Piwik PRO Tracking API. For users of your site, who are utilising mobile phones that have Javascript enabled, Piwik PRO will automatically track them as well.

How are Piwik PRO actions measured?

Simply put, the actions you specify are recorded by the Piwik PRO software every time the user hits a “target”, such as the download action, downloading a file or image. Once this action is completed, or the link selected the Piwik PRO software records and stores this data. The data is made available to you through the cloud software. All data is 100% yours, however help and support is available at all times.

What actions does Piwik PRO Pro allow?

There is a variety of Actions you can track in Piwik PRO. The most common ones are Page views, Downloads, Outlinks, Custom Events and Goals. We’d also like to draw your attention to a relatively new feature called Content Tracking. Let’s have a brief look at all of them:

Page Views

This report contains information about the number of times your website’s pages URLs have been visited.

File downloads

Piwik PRO automatically tracks your file downloads, with over 70 popular file types supported. A download is automatically tracked as a click on a link that ends with one of the supported file extensions. If the file type you require is not be listed, you can also force Piwik PRO to count a click as a download inserting a specific CSS class for this link. For the majority of website owners, you want to track when visitors download your brochure, a photo or software. Piwik PRO automatically tracks these clicks as downloads, and reports them under the Actions tab > Downloads menu.

Outlinks

The outlink action in Piwik PRO allows users to see which links to external domains were clicked by your website visitors most often. The Piwik PRO report stores data on these outlinks in Actions > Outlinks. The outlink report provides users with the list of external URLs that were clicked by your visitors from your website pages. Piwik PRO tracks all outlinks, by tracking all clicks on URLs that are not the same domain as the website being tracked. To explain, if your visitor clicks on a link to “example1.com” on your website “example2.org”, this will be counted as an outlink in the outlink report.

For each outlink, Piwik PRO will report the number of clicks, and the number of unique clicks. A unique click is defined as the number of unique visitors that clicked to a given domain. To clarify, this means if a user clicked on the link three times, the report would note this as three clicks and one unique click.

Custom Events

Events are additional customisable actions that can be tracked in Piwik PRO using Javascript. They are, for example, useful for tracking the progress of playing a particular video on your website, including clicks to start and stop the video.

Goals

By goal we mean a priority or action that can be measured and analysed to give us a better idea of whether our website is performing well. It could entail things like the number of visits to a specific page (ex. thank-you page), contact form fill-ins, or e-book downloads. Well-selected goals can help us learn how to increase our conversions, and eventually, revenue.

You can learn more about Piwik PRO Goals in our series of related tutorials:

• How to Set Up Goals in Piwik PRO
• How to Read a Report and use it for Website Fine-tuning
• How to Set Up and Track Goal Revenue in Piwik PRO

Content Tracking

A relatively new addition to the Piwik PRO tracking options, Content Tracking lets you determine the performance of the pieces of content on any page of your website, or app. The content tracking “impressions” and “clicks” also count as Actions. You can read more about Content Tracking in our User Guides section. We will dedicate one of the future posts to write more about all the good things this feature can do for your website.

How many sites can I track with Piwik PRO actions?

There is no limit to the number of sites you can track.

We hope you find this information useful and if you have any doubts about Piwik PRO, don’t hesitate to give us a shout or ping us on Twitter. We also have Action Reports User Guide prepared for you, if you want to dig a little deeper.

Happy analytics!