The challenges of creating a scalable, multi-site Piwik Pro Setup

Part I of “Scaling with Piwik Pro Manager”

European Web Analytics vendor Piwik Pro has become a popular option. And deservedly so: It does a lot of things well. But scaling is a challenge, especially when it comes to Tag Manager or Custom Dimensions. A new, free Google Sheets tool changes that.

No time to read? Get Piwik Pro Manager for Google Sheets right away.

Piwik Pro has established itself on the Analytics scene. In the last years, many organizations have adopted it after either struggling with Google Analytics 4 and/or privacy requirements. And it does a very good job in most cases: Its Analytics interface is not Adobe Analytics Analysis Workspace, but fast, reasonably flexible, and less confusing than Google Analytics 4, it has a great API, and there are no fundamental design errors like requiring “Session Start” Events. Piwik Pro even comes with a Consent Manager which is well integrated with their Tag Manager, and it also offers audience exports with its so-called “Customer Data Platform” (CDP).

An abstract digital painting depicting an Admin overwhelmed by data collection and tag management redundancies. Source: OpenAI

The scaling challenge

However, one thing that I have had trouble with was scaling, especially with Piwik Pro Tag Manager (TM):

*Scaling means having one centralized standard (standard Custom Dimensions, standard Tags, Variables, and Triggers), and then applying it across multiple PP Sites, without requiring duplicate work, while maintaining a transparent overview over what is deployed where.*

To be fair, Piwik Pro offers “Meta Sites” (see my article on Meta Sites pros and cons), but while Meta Site can help with some things, especially on the Analytics side, they are insufficient when it comes to governance and standardized data collection.

Make no mistake here, Piwik Pro is not alone with its scaling pains. While Adobe Analytics scales well in terms of management of dimensions, metrics, segments, reports, data imports and all kinds of other stuff across multiple sites ((Virtual) Report Suites), Adobe’s Tag Management System Launch (now called Tags 🤯) scales poorly, too. The only workaround is to add a lot of complexity in the form of a custom Launch Extension, to which I have dedicated an entire series. And while Google Tag Manager scales pretty decently, we just need to look at the complete lack of features in GA4 that would allow to manage settings or Custom Dimensions across multiple properties. Luckily, there are community tools like Google Analytics Utilities by Ben Kuhn or Eivind Savio’s GA4 Documentation, both Google Sheets Extensions.

For Piwik Pro, there was nothing similar so far. So I built Piwik Pro Manager! This series will introduce you to this new, free tool which makes Admin life easier and scaling possible.

First, I want to stress one point which is often underrated or disregarded completely by less experienced Tag Management professionals: A good Tag Management System (TMS) is not one that easily lets you build all kinds of click, visibility or scroll listeners with automatic link delay and similar fluff. These things can also be handled with self-written JavaScript if needed.

A good TMS avoids tech debt

A good TMS instead is one that helps avoid tech debt. For this, a good TMS makes it easy to maintain one central standard. Thus, a good TMS helps avoid redundancies like the pest. For example, you should not need to make the same change in two properties, and you should easily be able to see what is implemented how and where without clicking deep into things first, you should be able to find anything quickly by text search or by filtering (e.g. “all Tags requiring Conversion Tracking Consent” or “All Google Ads Tags”).

A good TMS also allows to rename components without having to worry about breaking something, because naming is key for maintainability. Both Adobe Launch and Piwik Pro Tag Manager are problematic here: You rename a Variable because its old name wasn’t precise enough, or to adapt it to a naming convention, and then you have to search through all your setup (hard to do with the meagre search function of these systems) to then manually change the reference to that variable there. Not to mention if you have to do this in several containers… The result: You will either break things, or you will waste a lot of time and money on every change, or (most likely) you will not rename anything, and soon your TMS will be full of misleading legacy names and become a maintenance nightmare!

The challenge: TM container & Analytics property are hard-wired

There is one thing with Piwik Pro Tag Manager that is particularly challenging: Multi-site tagging, i.e. tracking from one Tag Manager container to multiple Piwik Pro Analytics properties. I don’t recommend doing that at all. The reason for this is a deep-rooted architectural legacy: Piwik Pro — just like Matomo — was built with the underlying assumption that one Tag Manager container is always connected to just one Analytics property.

For example, if you create a new Piwik Pro “Site”, you get an Analytics property AND a Tag Manager container for that Site. There also is a Piwik Pro Analytics Config Tag pre-installed in the TM container. That Config Tag can only refer to that one Piwik Pro Analytics property, and you cannot add a second Analytics Config tag for another property.

You can liken this to being able to track only into one Google Analytics property from a particular Google Tag Manager container. That also means it is near-impossible to do something as basic as tracking the same data, but to a non-production Analytics property, e.g. when in debug mode or on the staging website.

Thus, in Piwik Pro, if you have multiple Analytics sites (one for your EMEA website, one for the US, one for APAC, one for Africa etc.), you have to live with a ghastly redundant Tag Manager setup where you need to do the same thing you do for EMEA again for US and APAC and Africa.

A client case: from good intentions to an unmaintainable setup

That’s what a client experienced. They tried maintaining hundreds of tags and triggers across multiple PP Sites (altogether roughly 1500 tags and nearly 5000 triggers), the idea being that most of the stuff in the EMEA Site should be the “leading standard” to be replicated in the other Sites and updated there whenever the central standard definition changed. But it led to what it had to inevitably lead to: Many changes in the “central” Site were not replicated in the other Sites, or they were replicated, but with little mistakes. When a “quick fix” was necessary, it was often performed in just one Site. So in the end, they had a hugely redundant setup with all kinds of small differences and bugs. It had become uncontrollable and unmaintainable.

Lack of discipline? No, because the inability to maintain a central Tag Manager standard across Sites would require an insane level of discipline to not end up where they ended up. And even if they had had the discipline, think about the insane waste of resources for the redundant maintenance.

Piwik Pro API to the rescue!

So when I was brought in, I suggested to clean up and standardize the setup. But I did not want to create and maintain everything x times for x containers. Luckily, Piwik Pro Tag Manager has an API. A very fast and powerful one. On top of this, I built **Piwik Pro Manager** — a tool which allows to better handle the challenges mentioned, and a lot more.

[embed]

It is built on top of the same technology that drives the Adobe Analytics Component Manager for Google Sheets, by Datacroft, a tool that is used by organizations around the globe to clean up and maintain Adobe Analytics more efficiently. While the most powerful features of the Component Manager are for paying customers, Piwik Pro Manager is free.

How to get started in 5 minutes:

[embed]

The following parts of this series will explain, step by step, how you can achieve a scalable and maintainable Tag Manager and Custom Dimension Setup for multiple Piwik Pro “Sites”.

Continue with

• Part II: Clone, bulk-edit and keep your Custom Dimensions in sync across Sites
• … or go straight to Part III: How to create and maintain a global Piwik Pro Tag Manager Standard across Sites

Subscribe to read first, and free

Thanks for reading, and do subscribe to get my new articles right into your mailbox. No Medium paywall. 😉