Track Your Web Traffic With Clicky

I have to admit, I’m a web statistics freak. There are at least three different stat packages installed on my websites, sometimes even four! I mainly use Google Analytics, which used to be Urchin, a web analytics company bought out by Google in 2005. Performancing Metrics is also quite good, it goes well with my blogs. The other two are served locally, namely Mint and Analog.

Now, the question is, do I really need another one? I read about Clicky at Emily‘s blog and immediately got excited about it. What’s nice about Clicky, besides it being free, is it allows you to track your users individually – how they got to your site and how long they “stuck around”. To put it to the test, I installed it on a heavily visited site that gets about 30,000 pageviews and 4,000 uniques per day. A few minutes after inserting the required HTML code, my stats began to appear on my dashboard. Cool. It’s not exactly in “real-time” but it’s way more up-to-date than Google Analytics which sums up your data only once a day. The downside is, you only get to see three days’ worth of stats on your dashboard while everything else gets drowned in a monthly summary.

About a day after I registered, ironically due to heavy traffic, Clicky’s servers crashed and lost a majority of its data. Sean Hammons, Clicky’s creator, decided to hook up with a dedicated server on Dreamhost (which I’m trying to wean my sites away from, but that’s a different story). He also registered two more memorable domain names – www.clickystats.com and www.getclicky.com – which I think is an excellent marketing move if he wants his product to take off. Everything went back up just a few hours ago and my stats are ticking away again. Although not as robust as I’d want it to, Clicky is a nice complement to my batch of stat programs and should serve the needs of smaller websites. It also promises a feature that emulates Digg Spy. Sounds good to me.

On the web: Clicky