From a website owner’s point of view, visitor statistics are fascinating, and highly motivational. For the longest time, I used Google Analytics, but for around a year now, I’ve been using Clicky Web Analytics on my website. I want to explain to you why I love Clicky.
Clicky’s dashboard is so informative. Straight away, I can see how many visitors my website has received today, how many pages these visitors have looked at, and more. A graph of today’s visitors, compared with yesterday’s is presented for easy comparison. Scrolling down the page, I can see which sites have been sending me traffic, which of my pages are the most popular (currently Broomstick, which has been viewed 9,743 times in the past 90 days), my top Google search terms, and finally the countries in which my website is the most popular.
By navigating through the site, I can access more detailed information, and get to other cool features such as Spy. Spy lets you see, in real time, who is visiting your website, which pages they are looking at, their browser, computer, and location. This information is presented on a map.
Another cool feature is the Big Screen mode, where all of the current information is displayed in large fonts on a dark background, allowing you to just set it up on your computer, and see who is visiting your site.
Clicky also has Goals, Campaigns, a URL shortener, though I’ve never used either of these features. Clicky Web Analytics is free for one website, and up to 3000 daily page views, and premium plans start from $4.99 per month. Clicky, while not perfect, is the best way I’ve found for collecting visitor statistics.
Full disclosure: Clicky Web Analytics affiliate links have been used in this post.
