Google Analytics is probably one of the most popular Website Analytics tools on the market. It provides a wealth of information about how visitors are browsing and interacting with your website, it’s relatively easy to install, and it’s free. But there are some other interesting services on the market that can provide some different insights into the behavior of your website visitors.
One of our recent favorites is called Clicky Website Analytics. Be sure to click through and learn more about their fantastic service offerings. After you read this post, of course.
There’s a great Website Analytics Comparison chart that gives a fairly thorough breakdown about what Clicky offers that Google and other analytics providers do not. Reading through this chart will give you a solid understanding of why we actually bothered to write an entire post dedicated exclusively to this service. However, if you’re pressed for time, here are our personal Top 4 Favorite Things:
Real-Time Analytics
Our favorite thing about Clicky is that it’s real-time. You can load up the “Spy” page, and if someone logs onto your website, you will see that information pop up on your screen within a matter of seconds. Then, you’ll see each page they click to, as they’re navigating. Yes, we realize that Google very recently announced the inclusion of “real time” analytics into its services. However, as Clicky noted on their blog post, this is a bit misleading. Well, very misleading actually. The new Google services only include ONE report that uses real-time data. Everything else is business as usual. So, we’re still fans of Clicky for this feature.
Detailed Information About Every User
This feature makes it incredibly easy to see information about a specific visitor to your website, all collected in one place. Clicky will give you a detailed breakdown about the visitor’s location, language, operating system, screen resolution, web browser, and more. Combined with the real-time reporting, you can often use this information to troubleshoot specific website issues.
You Can Track Twitter Activity
If you want to easily keep up with what people are saying about your brand on Twitter, Clicky can help. You just enter the keywords you want to track, and Clicky will monitor when people mention those keywords, and give you all sorts of intelligence about that activity.
Video Tracking
Clicky can track videos embedded on your website from a variety of website services. This can be incredibly insightful for seeing how effective your videos are at capturing your visitors’ attention. See how much times users are spending on average watching your videos, average time before they paused or jumped somewhere new, total time spent watching your video, and how many people watched the entire video. If you’ve got a commercial, or some other promotional video, you can quickly see if you are losing your visitors at a particular point, and if you need to consider uploading a revised version to increase retention (and ultimately visitor conversion).
Honestly, there are a ton of other features that we’re tempted to write about. Particularly the fact that Clicky is insanely flexible, and can be configured to do some pretty cool stuff. But, some of those features start to get a bit technical, and since we’re trying to keep this a bit more accessible we thought we’d just send those of you who are interested in learning more over to GetClicky.com where you can Clicky to your heart’s content.