In my quest to stop sending Google so much data, I replaced Analytics with Clicky, a paid service. I looked into and trialed quite a few services, including some free ones you install on your own server. Clicky won the day for me. What Clicky excels at is showing you precisely what your visitors are doing while they’re on your site. That particular feature blows away Analytics, Mint and others I’ve tried.
Clicky’s Spy feature
There are a few ways to track your visitors. One of them is called Spy:
Spy shows you a world map with dots representing where your current visitors are logging in from. Blue dots mean that visitor has performed two or more actions (an “action” is a “pageload”), and the red dots have only performed one. Beside the map is a list of your most visited pages at the moment. Below the map is a list of every visitor with their country, their IP, operating system and browser, and what page of your site they’re on right now. If a particular visitor grabs your interest, click their IP address, and you immediately find out what city they’re logging in from, what screen resolution they use, etc. It’s a wealth of information. And you can assign a name to frequent visitors, which is a very useful feature if you want to understand what aspects of your site appeal to which individuals.
The visitor interface
There’s also the Visitor tab, which shows all your latest visitors and gives you an idea what they did while visiting.
At a glance, you see each visitor, their country, how many actions they’ve performed, how long they’ve been on the site, and where they came from. (The one I blacked out is an identified visitor.) Click the number of actions performed, and you go to that visitor’s screen (as you did from Spy when you clicked the IP), and you can see which pages they visited, at what time.
These features allow you to observe things like: “Someone from Perth, Australia just came to my site, spent 10 minutes reading two articles, and emailed one of them to someone.” That’s some seriously helpful information if you really want to understand your visitors.
Stats at a glance
Something I loved about Analytics was logging in each day and seeing that chart with all my sites listed and how many visits they’d had in the last 30 days. I’d memorize the numbers (roughly), and knew from day to day if things were trending up or down. Clicky goes one better. They have a chart of your visitors over the last 28, 60, 90 or 180 days, or by month, and you can pick “Same thing, previous period” for an automatic comparison of two 28 day (or whatever you chose) periods. You can also compare Today to Yesterday, 7 Days Ago, Same Day of Week Average (like, comparing today’s Wednesday to the average of all other Wednesdays), Weekday Average and Weekend Average. This is all in your standard dashboard.
But Clicky also has a feature called Big Screen, which is designed to give you a simplistic view of everything going on at one of your sites today. It’s a beautiful looking interface:
But here’s the part I really like:
That shows me precisely how I’m doing, both in visitors and actions, today compared to yesterday. That’s something I often want to know, particularly when a link seems to be going viral.
More stuff you can compare in the standard dashboard: it’s almost ridiculous how much stuff you can compare, but the more I play with it, the more useful I find a lot of it:
- Actions and visitors over a whatever number of days period. This would show if there’s a time of day when you’re getting a lot of bounces, for example.
- Visitors and Pages. It then asks you which page you want to compare. If I look at my most popular one, the Pages line runs pretty much along with the Visitors line, only a bit lower because they’re not all going there (but most of my visitors do). If I pick a less popular page, then the two graph lines are much further apart.
- Visitors and Searches. See how many of your visitors are coming from searches.
There are about twenty other things you can compare. That’s not an exaggeration.
Google rankings at a glance
Never want to search Google to check where you’re ranking for keywords? Now you don’t have to! Clicky can tell you, based on what Google reports:
…it turns out the referrer string for Google searches typically includes a variable in the URL, “cd”, which signifies the approximate ranking of the link someone clicked on to get to your site for a search term. e.g. “1″ would mean your page was the top result.
This data can be found in several areas of the Clicky interface – basically, wherever it’s logical. Sean has volunteered to add in rankings for any other search engine that reports them in the URL, too. This is fabulous, and it’s tallied with the results I get from actually checking the phrases in Google myself, without fail. By the way, numbers like “1.3″ are an average, for when Google is showing you in different spots in different locations.
Other features
Clicky has a ton of other features. I simply don’t need them all, myself. I doubt anyone but a very big operator makes use of all of them, but they’re all there because somebody needs them.
- Customizable Dashboard. You can set your dashboard to show you precisely what you want to see at a glance, no more, no less.
- Goals and Campagins. I’ve never used these with any stat program, but I really should start.
- Alerts. You can configure Clicky to send you a sound or desktop alert anytime you get a new visitor, a particular visitor, a goal you’ve set is reached, a particular search brings a visitor, a particular referral link brings a visitor, etc. This is a super cool feature when you’re launching a new site, or aiming to get an inbound from a particular site, etc.
- Typical stat stuff. As with many stat programs, you can see where visitors are coming from, look at how a particular search phrase has increased or declined in popularity, check visit times, bounce rate, etc. You can dig in very fine to reveal what’s behind any of these numbers.
Clicky support and other stuff
Clicky is self-hosted, which I wanted because using a self-installed program meant more burden on my server. The admin, Sean, often adds features the day someone requests them. Recently, there have been some issues with tracking that caused some loss of data. His response was a monster post on the blog explaining in great detail what wasn’t working, what he tried to do to fix it, why that didn’t work and what other stuff coincidentally went wrong at the same time. I felt he was very honest, and came away with the feeling that it takes a lot of stuff going wrong to cause problems at Clicky as opposed to the single issue that usually screws up services like this one – even big corporate ones. He offered to refund anyone’s bill for the month, too (I didn’t take him up on it because I don’t feel my stats were affected to the point where I hadn’t gotten my money’s worth, and I’ve had big companies screw up much worse without offering any kind of compensation). I think this is a great example of Clicky’s support, and you can read the blog post to decide if this is the kind of outfit you want to deal with.
Pricing at Clicky is on the low side, for sure. $59.99/year will get you coverage for an average of 30,000 pageloads a day, spread amongst up to 10 sites. That’s a lot of traffic, and your account doesn’t have to be upgraded the second you have a day that goes over 30k. I won’t pretend I completely understand how it works, but basically, Sean is pretty flexible, and will let you know in advance when you need to upgrade the account (no overage fees or anything like that, either).
I’m very pleased with Clicky. I’m actually learning how to be a better webmaster by playing with these stats until I understand why you’d want them. I’m learning so much about my visitors, and why they come, stay, leave and return. Analytics helped me understand how my site was performing, but Clicky gives me insight into why it’s performing that way, and ideas about how to make it perform better.
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