My company owns a lot of domain names, and we have created various sites to host on those domains over the years. The one problem we’ve always had was trying to figure out the best web stats software to use on all of these sites. I’ve tried Google Analytics, which is ok but very limiting in my opinion, as far as being able to back them up, search, etc. I’ve also tried awstats and webalizer, but found them really technical. Yes, I said “technical”…even the geekinator gets confused with technology sometimes : ). I thought I had hit the motherload when I found Piwik Stats, which is a free Open Source web analytics script. It has some really great features, and is really simple to use, but unfortunately for me, it doesn’t seem to work that great when you’re trying to track a ton of websites on a single server. The processing script takes hours and hours to process the traffic on all my sites, and was kind of glitchy when dealing with that amount of data. I would get strange, random, results. I’m sure Piwik is a great solution for someone who only needs to track up to a few sites, but that wasn’t me. I decided I really just needed a service that hosted the tracking software, and used their server for processing the data.

I had almost given up and just put Google Analytics on each site, so at least I have something tracking visitors….something’s always better than nothing. Then, one day, I started to get frustrated with having to create a ton of accounts, under a single google login, in order: to track the hundreds of domains that I own. I though to myself “There has to be a better way, without me having to create my own script. I really don’t want to reinvent the wheel if I absolutely don’t have to”. A few hours of searching, finally brought Clicky Stats to my attention!

Clicky Stats is available at http://getclicky.com, and is HANDS DOWN the absolute best web site visitor tracking service/script I have ever had the pleasure of using! You may be asking yourself, “Well, ok, what does Clicky do?”. My response to you would be, What doesn’t Clicky do?!? This software is amazing, and lets you have control of your stats, instead of leaving you wondering how you’ll be able to use the stats.

First off, the creator of Clicky Stats, wrote a really simple and powerful API to allow anyone to access their stats in any format they want. Yes, there are other web stats packages out there that offer an API as well, and that’s all fine and dandy, except I’ve never used one that’s so easy to use. Second, Clicky gives you every piece of data under the sun about the user. Lets run down the feature list, if I may (Get ready for this…it’s a huge list : ) ):

  • Customizable dashboard that displays data about the current day
  • List of visitors for the requested date period
  • How many actions each user took while on your site (i.e. how many links they clicked/pages they viewed)
  • How long each visitor spent on the site
  • The referring site/search engine, plus any search query they typed in to find your site
  • Each visitor’s IP address, Hostname, ISP, Language, Location, Operating System, Web Browser, Screen Resolution, and whether or not they have Javascript enabled in their browser.
  • Action log of each individual visitor, which tells you in order which pages they visited on your site
  • List of the most active visitors on your site, along with their IP and how many visits they have had in a given date period
  • Traffic sources, broken up by searches, direct/bookmark, links, email, and social media
  • Web browsers used, broken up by browser version
  • Operating Systems used, broken up by operating system version
  • Mobile devices used, broken up by device version (i.e. iPhone, iPod touch, Blackberry, etc)
  • Screen Resolutions used
  • List of visitors’ Country
  • List of visitors’ Region (i.e. State or Province)
  • List of visitors’ City
  • List of visitors’ Language
  • List of visitors’ Hostname and Organization (i.e. their ISP)
  • Global map of all the visitors for a given date period
  • Global map of recent visitors
  • List of all the pages visited, along with a hit count (I’d like to see a unique visitor count per page, but I can’t have it all I guess : ) )
  • List of all entrance pages, along with hit count
  • List of all exit pages, along with hit count
  • List of all downloaded files, along with hit count
  • List of all clicks (not sure exactly what this does)
  • List of incoming links (links that people clicked to bring them to your site. i.e. a link in forum post for instance. This has the exact url of the page the link was on)
  • List of domains that brought visitors to your site
  • List of outgoing links (external links that may exist on your site)
  • List of links that recently brought visitors to your site
  • Unique List of links that recently brought visitors to your site
  • List of short urls (i.e. clicky has a short url service, called clicky.me, which allows you to create a short link, that redirects to your page that has a long url. Tinyurl.com does this as well)
  • List of searches (through search engines) that brought visitors to your site, along with a visitor count
  • List of keywords typed in during those searches (basically, it splits the search phrase into individual words, and then gives you a visitor count per word)
  • List of search engines, along with their subdomains, that brought visitors to your site, including a visitor count from each domain.
  • List of recent searches that brought visitors to your site
  • Unique list of recent searches that brought visitors to your site
  • You can create goals for marketing that you can then track, to see if the marketing is working or not.
  • You can track advertisement campaigns as well. I’m not quite sure how you do that, since I’ve never played with that feature.
  • You can track traffic through your Twitter feed, if you like. Again, I’m not quite sure how that works, because I haven’t played with it.
  • My absolute favorite feature of Clicky, is the real time Spy feature. This thing is so cool…what it does, is show you an ajaxified (I’m guessing) map of real time traffic on your site! It shows a pin where the visitor is in the world, and what they’re searching for to find your site, along with what page they’re currently on or have been on. You can literally spend hours watching people mess around on your site…it’s really cool.
  • Another really useful feature, is the ability to setup scheduled email reports, that send you requested data from your stats, by day, week, or month.
  • You can also output selected data in CSV or XML format, which is really handy.
  • You can also track your feedburner account, if you have one.
  • Another feature that I really like is the ability to block your own IP address, so it doesn’t count your personal visits.
  • Last, but not least, are the widgets. There are multiple widgets that allow you to display certain traffic data on your site, if you would like to do so.

There you have it…whewwww, that was a lot of typing! Anyway, I hope you get my point. Clicky is the most useful tracking software I have ever found. If you know of something better or similar, please let me know.

I have to say, the pricing is fantastic as well. I won’t say what my monthly fee is, but I can tell you it’s way more than fair. Here’s a link to their standard pricing page. I was given a custom price, because I have a lot more domains than they show on the price page.

If you’d like to check out Clicky, and signup for an account, click here. You can even try it out with a FREE account, which limits the features and amount of data, etc, but you can get a great idea of what Clicky has to offer your site.