If you run a website, you need analytics, without it you are running your online business blind.
There are some great packages out there, all of which do similar things. The obvious choice is installing Google Analytics. It’s free and easy to add to any website or blog to track visitors to your site. It offers a plethora of information, stats and figures as well as tools to set up goals and track ecommerce purchases.
However, if you want “real time” stats and a fab Spy feature (so you can watch what people are doing on your website right now) Clicky Web Analytics is by far the best analytics tool out there! And it’s FREE for one website!
The Spy feature isn’t the only thing that sets it apart from Google’s offering. You can track visitors by IP (handy for blocking click fraudsters in Google AdWords), set up Goals and track visitors back to their first entrance and even name your visitors. This is a great tool to be able to block yourself and those who work on your website from skewing up the stats.
What features does Clicky offer that Google Analytics can’t?
- Detailed information about every person who visits your web site
- Live view of every individual visitor on your site right now
- Heatmaps of where visitors are clicking on pages
- On-site analytics (small widget that displays who is on your web site right now, as well as the ability to view a heatmap of the page you are viewing)
- Uptime monitoring
- Search keyword rankings
- Dynamic goals (don’t need to be pre-defined)
- Track visitors who have disabled JavaScript
- Video analytics
- Alerts via email/mobile
- Alerts via desktop, sounds, and more
- Mobile hardware reporting
- Twitter analytics – monitors and summarizes conversations about your web site or other topics of interest
- Built in URL shortener with detailed visitor metrics
- bit.ly integration
- IP tags
To name but a few! Wow that’s a big list, you can still use GA as a comparison, but in conjunction with Clicky you will become a whole lot more savvy about your website visitors actions, geographic location and their needs, enabling you to optimise your website further not for SEO but for your visitor (which in turn with have an impact on your SEO and quash your bounce rate and boost your conversion rate), who doesn’t want that?
Clicky is free to try and you can track one website on the free plan, upgrading to the Starter package will enable you to use the Spy feature, and upgrading to Pro enables HTTPS, Sub-users, Goals, Campaigns, Big screen, and Twitter keyword monitoring. Some features listed above are only available on the paid for plan.
If you run a WordPress Blog it is really simple to add the Clicky Plugin by Yoast and view your new analytics software directly in your WordPress Dashboard!
*Please note this post contains affiliate links that I may make a commission out of should you sign up to Clicky.
