ALPHA version currently
Current Piwik contains a disabled-by-default plugin called Live! that, when enabled, add a new widget in the widget list, that will show your latest visitors in real time. However this plugin is not very useful as such, and was built as a proof of concept. Improving the plugin has been one of the most requested user feature for months! If you would like to help, please post a comment, or submit a patch. Enjoy
Concept
The page should be entertaining to watch, fed with real time data, and open the webmaster to dig more into the other reports that Piwik offer.
Background
This feature is heavily requested by the community (http://feedback.phpmyvisites.net/feedbacks/2630-last-n-visitor-details-config-info-path-etc) and would be really providing a plus to Piwik feature set.
Data provided
- at top of screen, clear summary:
– Today you had: N visits, M pages today
– In the last 30 minutes you had: X visits, Y pages
- list of the last N visitors with their information
– settings (os, browser, resolution, plugins) – icons only, details on icon hover
– referer (keyword, name, icon, clickable url – useful for SEO)
– country icon
– IP for piwik users with admin permission or super user
– count of pages seen during this visit
– time spent during this visit
– number of goals converted, click on goals would show the list of pages with goals highlighted (see below)
- for each visit, it is possible to view pages:
– page title,
– page url that links to it,
– outlinks are shown different colors (icon ?)
– downloads are shown different colors (icon ?)
– when the page view was a Goal trigger, different color (icon ?) along with goal name and revenue.
UI features
- this page should make it possible to view all past visits for a current returning visitor. The idea would be to have an icon when the visitor is a returning visitor. Clicking on this icon would show the past visits for this visit. This is a UI challenge to make it look good and make it usable. for examples, previous visits rows could be shown below the visit row with a left margin and below a title “This visitor previously visited the website:”.
- by default, the spy mode would be enabled, therefore the page would reload regularly (every 2 seconds?) and show the new visits. We need a way to pause/resume the spy mode, if traffic is too big or if user wants to take more time to analyze existing traffic snapshot
- all the data would be shown in a one page interface, to simplify browsing and discovery; this poses UI challenges to make the page usable and looking clean.
- all data would be provided through the Live! plugin API.
- there is an open question on how to refresh visits for which visitors view a new page. For example, we could highlight the visit row in yellow background and add the new page row below the visit. Or we could automatically move the visit with the new page view at the top of the page and highlight (eg. yellow background) the new page view.
in V2
- on the right of the spy, or on a different “spy page”, we could show a auto-refreshing google map with the new visits in real time. see #5466
Any feedback? Anybody would like to help implementing this interesting new plugin and UI challenge?