Clicky is a Web Analytics service that provides real time stats monitoring and tracking along with a ton of useful features and a pretty decent interface. There are some tweaks I'd like to see to the look when monitoring multiple sites under one account, but other than that, after a few days of use, I'm pleasantly surprised with the speed and features of the service.

The Basics

Like every other web traffic monitoring solution, Clicky gives you an overview of website visitors, pages/actions per visitor, time each visitor spent online, and how each visitor came to your site (direct link or type-in, link from another site, search engine, etc). Of course there are also pretty little graphs, in depth break down by use, and host name resolution so you can see where people are coming from and which internet provider brought them there. Something Clicky adds which many other web traffic analytics programs don't is a running tally of your "Bounce Rate". The "Bounce Rate" is defined by Clicky as the percentage of users that hit a page of your site but don't do anything additional (visit any other part of your site, click on anything or take any action). You haven't held the attention of these users for some reason, so they "Bounce" from your page on to something else.

Maps - More Than Cool

Another feature of Clicky is the "Visitor Map". I've seen other web analytics programs offer this, but I've never seen one implemented as well as Clicky does. The "Visitor Map" area shows the world using Google Maps with red flags at the location of each of your visitors (you can display the last 100, 500, or 1000). Clicky excels in this area because of how it integrates data with each flag. A click of the flag will show you the date and time of the visit, the visitor's Internet Provider, their City & State, keywords they used (if they came from a search engine) and a link to complete details of their session. Of course you can zoom in and do all the cool things Google Maps provides, but the compelling part of the Visitor Map is not the map itself but what you can do with it. Let's say your company took on a targeted direct-mail campaign to a specific zip code. Now you can really see the results. Of course you can track results by providing a specific URL on the mail piece, but often these don't provide accurate results as some customers still use search engines to find you or type in the wrong or incomplete address. With the Visitor Map function of Clicky, you can couple your URL targeting with an actual map and get a much clearer picture of how your geo-targeted marketing efforts are working.

Spy

Another nice feature of Clicky is "Spy". Spy does exactly what you would think, it let's you see how users are interacting with your site real time. This is really good if you are implementing something new on your site or just completed some e-mail/newsletter marketing efforts. Does your e-commerce site have a high number of abandoned shopping carts? Are you getting a lot of traffic to a specific page but not turning them into sales? Watch your users in real time and see what's turning them off. Make adjustments where appropriate and watch your visitor-to-sales conversions increase.

HTTP & HTTPS

Most analytics programs fail at this point, but this is where Clicky shines... https tracking. Clicky provides the same data for HTTPS traffic as it does for non-encrypted HTTP traffic, and it doesn't break your SSL certificate in the process (you know that little lock in the corner). That means that if a user starts the checkout process and then abandons it for some reason, I'm no longer blind wondering what happened. Maybe they just decided to stop, but maybe they clicked on the "Terms" or "Shipping" details before canceling their order... maybe they left to go to another store to compare prices. Whatever happens, I can monitor that data and look for patterns. If a large number of users are abandoning their carts after clicking on the "Terms" or "Shipping" details, maybe I need adjust some of our procedures.

RSS Feeds

Another feature I love are the Feeds. RSS Feeds are fairly simple to implement and make many tasks so much simpler, yet many people still don't use them or implement them where they should. Not true with Clicky. Clicky offers traffic summary feeds, visitor feeds, search feeds and incoming link feeds, so you can keep a watchful eye over your website all the time.

White Labels

Clicky offers a ton of other features that may or may not interest the average user. But all webhosts should be interested in the White Label capability of Clicky. Because of this service, we can customize and simplify the website tracking and analytics for our customers and provide it to them with a simple interface that's easy to follow, branded with our company logo and with links to our company's contact information and support. These features mean we can provide better, more reliable data to our customers faster, and they are more likely to look at it as its much simpler to navigate and understand. It also means we are more accountable to our customer base, because I know they will be checking in on our progress to make sure we are converting a significant number of visitors to customers and keeping their "Bounce Rate" low.

Flash & Ajax Support

I'm not a big fan of Flash-heavy sites as they don't perform nearly as well in search engines, across multiple platforms, on slower connections, or through mobile devices. Nonetheless, some people insist on having sites entirely in Flash the same way that animated gifs were on virtually all homepages in the 90s. Flash or not, Clicky still gets the job done even if most alternatives would fail. It works on Ajax sites too, so there is really no reason why your site can't be Clicky.

Why Clicky?

Yes there are other options out there to monitor your website traffic and learn to convert more visitors to customers. From server side programs to Google Analytics, many of these analytics resources are even free. But when you compare features and user experience, Clicky stands above the rest and is worth the extra expense.

Get Clicky.

You do get what you pay for, and with Clicky you get a lot. With a 21 day trial you really have nothing to lose. So what are you waiting for, Get Clicky.