Open Source Tools Fuel Successful Web Sites

Piwik is open source web analytics software. When it comes to doing web analytics, it's beneficial to get as many views of your data as possible, so you can use Piwik in conjunction with a tool like Google Analytics or on its own.

Piwik's features are built inside plug-ins, and a community of developers contributes interesting plug-ins. It also has a very customizable interface where you can drag and drop the types of widgets you would like to keep an eye on regarding site metrics.

If you want to get the best sense for how it works, I recommend trying the Piwik online demo. It shows how you can see charts of how many visitors your site is getting, which browsers they are using, the lengths of their visits and there are many more of these types of metrics.

I'm always surprised by how few people doing advertising-driven things on the web don't know about OpenX, a free, open source ad server that serves more than 30,000 customers. GigaOm.com had a good story on OpenX yesterday, and discussed Google's answer to OpenX: Ad Manager.

OpenX recently secured $15.5 million in second round funding, and stands out for its flexibility. You can use it as a hosted service or you can download it if you want to run it on your own servers, keeping your ad revenue and information in-house. OpenX is ideal for small- to medium-size publishers who may not meet the hefty thresholds for traffic that can be required for big ad revenue dollars through other ad servers.

With OpenX you can deliver ads from multiple advertisers and ad networks, give high priority to higher value ad campaigns, increase overall click-through rates by limiting how often visitors see a campaign, and integrate the service with most popular existing databases.

If you have a site getting major traffic, you may want to look elsewhere, but OpenX is free and easy to start participating in if you get small or medium amounts of traffic at your site or blog.

Do you know of any good open source tools for running a successful web site?