Get Clicky with It

Clicky (www.getclicky.com ) is a fun yet useful freemium service that offers a variety of plans for tracking real-time metrics on your website. The free plan lets you track one website up to 3,000 page views a day and gives you access to real-time analytics on referrers, site visitors, segmentation, searches, and more. Clicky isn’t customizable like Google Analytics is, but if you want something that is prepackaged and set to run with minimal input from you, Clicky may be just what you need (see Figure 3-5).

One of my favorite features of Clicky is the Spy feature. Much like Woopra, it lets you spy on people as they use your site in real time. (For more on Woopra, see the section “Looking at Other Free or Freemium Tools,” later in this chapter.) This feature can give you invaluable user data on how people navigate your site. Do they go where you want them to from each landing page? How long do they stay? Do they find what they need? Unlike Woopra, Clicky doesn’t drain your bandwidth, so while you lose the cool Woopra chat feature, you don’t lose time waiting for the information to load for you.

Spend some time watching your site’s real-time visitors. Their activity tells you more about how well your site was designed faster than almost anything else. You can pinpoint design successes and mistakes and improve your site dramatically.

The other features of Clicky tell you similar metrics to those in Google Analytics, but without a few of the customization options Google Analytics has. Like Google Analytics, Clicky offers segmentation, which allows you to dig more deeply into your metrics to find out better answers to questions about your site demographics and use cases.

Clicky has a variety of apps and plug-ins you can use, including a Chrome plug-in, a Windows dashboard, WordPress and Drupal widgets, and code you can manually integrate into your sites and apps to get even more data fed to your Clicky metrics account. (Heck, it even has code for older sites like MySpace). The folks at Clicky have made it very easy to put Clicky everywhere you need it to be.