Hey Piotr,
Thanks for the reply.
I agree with Lukas, Piwik is better than GA4. And in a lot of aspects, better than GA UA as well. It’s a great product, and then you throw the privacy and European hosting on top of it and it’s a slam dunk. It’s also great to see European analytics companies growing and competing, not only in the local market, but outside of it too. Rooting for you guys. That’s also why I’m writing this, because I legitimately care about seeing you guys succeed.
I got started with Piwik in October 2022, which admittedly isn’t that long, but I’ve gotten pretty deep into it, used it a lot myself, and have first-hand seen how other experienced analysts with decades of experience use it as well. And personally, I feel like you guys are missing potential by not catering to the more experienced analyst audience. Most of the changes to the analytics module has been bug fixes/minor tweaks, QoL improvements (session timeouts, multiple accounts on one email), the Data Studio integration improvement, and the e-commerce module which has been great to see. The kind of stuff that when prioritised by a framework like ICE it gets done as a lot of users are affected by it, and it’s reasonably straight-forward to implement.
But I wish there was a bit more development velocity in more advanced analysis features that realistically only 5-20% of analysts will use, but the people who are able to ask those questions, and get answers to them, create massively outsized business impact. I get variations of the same question at least once a month from the analysts I work with. It’s always a variation of: how can I segment sessions by events in a session. “How can I see the effect of users who visited a certain page”. “What’s the conversion rate decrease when users encounter errors in the booking system, and which errors should we prioritise fixing?”. “How can I only include users who engaged with feature X in this analysis, and not everyone else”. Or “How can we analyse this A/B test in Piwik”.
The same question that has been raised multiple times on these forums.
And even the same question that Lukas asked himself this summer.
And the answer has been “it’s not possible”. Or “We can hack it with a custom session dimension, but it has these caveats and is not backwards compatible”.
I’m not saying that this is what’s happening, but I think it’s easy to assume to that users are generally worth the same and it’s better to develop features that most users will encounter. I’m making the case that the business value Piwik provides is dependent on the analyst, and spending some development time on serving the seasoned analysts who really dig deep into your tools and granularly into the data can really change Piwik from a “Choose Piwik, it’s the best we have at the moment” into “Choose Piwik, it’s totally worth it”.
I think I wrote my previous comment about spreading yourself a bit thin as that’s been my explanation for why most development in the analysis module has stuck to the “easy” and “necessary” stuff. But I really wish you guys would tackle some of the harder stuff. Like more advanced segments, comparing more than 2 segments, custom metrics, re-thinking the customizability of the report section, or reworking the organization of the custom reports section in the analysis module so that it can scale past small teams. The kind of stuff that isn’t a selling point for your sales team, but the features that day to day let the best analysts make outsized impacts on their organizations.
I’m mostly referring to the analytics module here, as that is in our case ultimately the reason we chose to use Piwik. Not the TMS, CDP or CMP.
And sorry for hijacking your thread Lukas, but I just noticed the same pattern here.
Cheers guys, here’s to a great 2024 