May 22 2007

Clicky Web Analytics 2.0 – My new playground

Posted by visio in General, Web Analytics
11 Comment

I normally don’t write articles on new analytics software but this one is really cool. It has an Ajax interface and virtually live data. Within 10 minutes of installing the tracking code you can see live statistics. Again I have been known to promote Google Analytics very highly as in my opinion it is the best analytics software on the web. My stance on that has not changed however I will use Clicky Web Analytics 2.0 side-by-side with Google Analytics. There are things I like about each tool and each has things the other doesn’t. I am pleased with the setup and ease of use of Clicky Web Analytics 2.0
Very easy to use and understand, they did a good job of putting it together and making it look good and still provide the stats we all want.

One of the great things about this tool is that they don’t overdo it, items are not crammed together and it is very easy to go through the statistics and to get to the items you want to see the most. On the home page of your stats you have on the left side your top content, incoming links and search data. This shows you the top content pages of your site, the page that get the most activity. Google analytics gives this data and IMHO does a better job and gives much more info on the top content pages and bounce rates. Again that is why I use them side-by-side now.

The next side-bar unit is the incoming links. This shows you the highest traffic incoming links. Which sites linking to you send you the most hits? I really like this feature, yes Google Analytics and other statistic tools give this data however most incoming php urls get chopped. So you can’t see the specific page they came from, only the domain. I HATE that. This tool appears to give you the full url to all the incoming hits. I am really happy about that! I like to see the pages I am linked from and see why, not just who is linking.

The next stat on the side-bar is the searches. This will show you the latest/highest search phrases for your site. Upon clicking a phrase you can see the search engine that brought the hit, the time of the hit(kind of cool), the ip(click the ip for the traffic pattern on your site the user has made), how many actions have been made by the user, where the user is from and what browser they are using, as well as the length of the visit. This data is all placed conveniently.

Then on the middle of the page you have graphs. These graphs show the past ten days and the traffic for each. There are also graphs depicting the visitor actions and average time spent on your site.

There is a visitors tab which allows you to view all your visitors, where they came from(what search/site/page), how many actions where produced by each and how long their visit lasted and even what time they appeared on your site. Again all the data is conveniently placed unlike some tools I have used in the past.

What are actions? Actions are page views(when a user hits another page that logs as a action), outgoing links(user clicks out of your site from one of your outbound links), downloads etc. By using the actions statistics you can see where each visitor went on your site and what time they went to the page so you can see how long they were at each page of your site. What brought them to your site? Where did they exit? You can see that there too. This tool uses flags to depict the region the user is from. It even shows a google map of where they are. Not sure that will do me any good but its there in case you need it

The content statistics. I personally prefer the Google Analytics top content stats better than Clicky. Basically these stats show you a graph, your top content for the day and how many hits each got. You can also click ‘entrance’ or ‘exit’ link to see which pages brought the most hits and which had the highest bounce rate.

The links stats give you the ability to see your top referers, incoming links and outgoing links. Which sites are sending me the most traffic? Which page on the site did the user come from. You can also see which sites you are sending the most traffic to. Again as I said before I do like how they set this up so that the php pages aren’t chopped. I will probably use this for checking the sites who link to me from now on.

Searches stats. This feature gives you your search data for the day. What phrases produced the most hits today? By clicking on a phrase you can see which engine the search came from. One thing that sadly Awstats lacks. If you click the ‘engines’ link you can see your highest search engine referers and see the data for each.

Lastly the spy data. This feature allows you to see live data of your site, what is going on RIGHT NOW on my site? See what is happening in real time. The only downfall to having it update live is for big sites, it is updated live so for large trafficked sites you won’t be able to see much as it will keep updating and bumping the results down. However Clicky has thought of this and added a cool feature which allows you to pause the data, look at your stats, get the info you need and then press play again so you can see all the latest data. Very cool!

So my conclusion? I like how Clicky provides all the data in an easy-to-access form and that it isn’t cluttered like many stat tools. I also like the ability to see direct page hits instead of just the domain that sent the hit.
I wouldn’t give up the Google Analytics data however, I like them both and will use them side-by-side.

You can also hook this up with Feedburner to see your FeedBurner stats right in the Clicky interface. For those of you who use FeedBurner for your stats this will be a great improvement.

As a replacement for AwStats this is awesome. If you use AwStats I HIGHLY recommend you make the change now. For Seo/Marketers and/or webmasters who like to stick their nose into web analytics I highly recommend you use Google Analytics and this tool side-by-side.

Also a cool feature to this tool is that it works well with Ajax sites, something most stat tools do not support. For you Web 2.0 lovers this tool is for you.

Check it out yourself: