Web analytics are extremely important. They give you the data you need to make data-driven strategic decisions about your website — and those are the very best kind. But there has been some upheaval in our usual favorite analytics programs recently. Jetpack stats is now a paid tool, and Google Analytics has become more difficult to use and less informative. It makes sense to look at some other options, and one worth looking at is Clicky analytics.
First, have a look at the dashboard. At the top of the page, you will see basic information on your visitors and the actions they took. The screenshot below is from the Clicky account of our lab site. You can see that we have a visitor every minute or two. Most recently, we had someone from the UK checking out “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and someone from the U.S. enjoying “Strega Nona Lesson Plans.” We can also easily see that the most popular post this week was the lessons for “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” The line graph shows that we had the usual dip in traffic over the weekend.
The first section at left shows “The Basics,” which include Visitors, Actions, Average Actions, Total Time, Average Time per Visit, and Bounce Rate. Clicky’s Actions include not only pageviews, but also downloads, outbound links, clicks, and video. You can expand Visitors to see New Visits and Unique Visitors. You can see recent visitor, too, along with their national flags. Don’t worry if you don’t immediately recognize all the flags — there’s more detail on this later.
Scroll down to see more. The screenshot below, still from our lab site, shows what you see when you scroll down.
Clicky’s next division is “Links,” which encompasses what Google calls “Referrals.” as well as some of the Actions. You can click through to see the referring site. However, Clicky also has Recent and Unique, which show a different set of referring sites. It’s not immediately clear that these multiple lists have advantages. You can also check the outgoing links to see where people went after your site — but that is a paid feature.
Your visitors
Locale is to the right, and here you can see the summary of visitors from varying nations. You can also switch to see Cities and Languages, and in the paid version you can get some additional information about the networks that visit you. This is information that Google used to offer and it was very helpful for several of our clients, so that might be worth paying for. It depends on your business model as well as your visitors. Locale at Clicky gives demographic and tech information about visitors. Click through to the main page of Locale to see maps — Google maps, as it happens.
Next Clicky shows Searches. The main screen just shows 512 secure searches and the remaining options, such as Keywords and Rankings, show no information in the free version. Click on “[secure search]” and you will see a screen like the one below. It shows where the visitor came from, the landing page, and the search engine they used.
Click on “action” and you see a screen like the one shown below. We can see that someone from Cambridge, Massachusetts, visited our fish classroom ideas page, and if we had a paid account we could see that person’s first visit. The tags give you information about the network. For this site, we can see that most visitors are at schools, which makes sense, but in some cases we found that they were in an apartment building or a corporation. Network information can let you know that a particular organization is visiting your website, which can be useful for sales or for evidence of thought leadership.
You can also see all the visitors to a particular page within your time frame. Again, this will be more or less useful depending on your business model.
Clicky shows real time search on the dashboard: the default is today and yesterday. However, there is also a section for paid accounts which is called “Spy.” This is more like Google Analytic’s real time report. It shows you current visitors, and the last 40 visitors, with fairly specific data about each. 
Clicky also integrates with SheerSEO.
Traffic sources
The final section on the Clicky dashboard is Traffic Sources. Clicky shows Direct, Referral, Search, and Advertising. Our lab site does no advertising, but Clicky still showed us one visit it identified as coming from advertising. I don’t know what to think about that, frankly. Otherwise, the various divisions show the same information as the Searches shown above.
Should you pay for Clicky?
Clicky gives you the first 3,000 visits each month for one website for free. The next tier is $9.99 a month for up to ten websites, up to 30,000 visits, with all these premium features:
Spy Sub-user accounts Advanced filtering Segments Track outbound links Organizations Path analysis Track downloads Email reports Heatmaps Video analytics Engagement reports Custom data tracking More data history Data export Goals & revenue Long term metrics Split testing Campaigns Alerts Multiple dashboards Better bounce rate On-site analytics Big screen mode Uptime monitoring
Leave a Reply