Clicky Review

March 15, 2010

in Analytics Solutions Reviews

Don’t Miss Out Clicky Real-Time Web Analytics

Clicky homepage screenshotOn our latest web analytics solution reviews, you could read about enterprise web analytics solutions for medium-large companies (websites). However, there are small businesses or private users with commercial websites, CMS platforms and blogs, that do not need all the complexity that comes with such advanced analytics software from various vendors. Clicky by Roxr software is one of the most popular paid analytics products that can give you just that. It incorporates Real-Time website tracking & analyzing features, advanced reports, segmentation, tracking and evaluating campaigns, twitter keywords’ monitoring, track Ajax and Flash events and much more. It seems that Clicky at GetClicky.com can be the perfect companion to your marketing tools’ arsenal.

Compared to Other Analytic Solutions

At first, when you check and compare Clicky vs other real-time analytics SaaS or software BI reporting products in its league, you can see the advantages it has over its competitors. On GetClicky.com website home-page, you can even see a feature comparison table, which compares Clicky vs Google Analytics, Woopra, Chartbeat, Piwik, StatCounter and SiteMeter.

There are even many large and known sites, which implement Clicky (GetClicky) SaaS real-time web stats’ product, like: Smashing Magazine, Mashable, wakoopa, CenterNetworks, BuySellAds.com, and others. Clicky is among the most popular live web analytics products on the market these days. You can find more information about which big sites (high Alexa rank) that implement each statistics services on Backend Battles Statistics Services page.

Some of the unique features that Clicky (GetClicky) has are: Twitter analytics (Twitter follower), dedicated Clicky online version for iPhone and other mobile devices,  campaign tracking, keywords rankings, IP tags and filters, stats via RSS feed, etc. let’s dig deeper and learn more about Clicky’s features.

Main Features

Real Time – The latest trends are real time SaaS web analytics services. Clicky is one of those real time SaaS solutions, which enables you to login and view your stats and traffic data as they happen. Being able to watch traffic spikes and see stats in real time will help you adapt to changes in traffic origins and aim your marketing efforts towards various compatible marketing channels to increase leads and ROI and understand KPI.

Detailed Reports – Clicky allows you to view history reports for an individual page, search term, referring domain, etc. You can compare each day data vs the previous day analytic data and better understand fundamental parts of trends. You will be able to view traffic source data and analytical reports by Direct/Bookmark, advertising, backlinks, searches, RSS readers, email and social media referring sites. Near each item, you can observe the percentage of the change and watch for tendencies and apply marketing strategies accordingly.

By clicking on each percentage figure, you will get a visual line chart that represents the changes in volume for each traffic source. You can filter the analytical data for the chart to reflect only the data tracked from the last 30 days, 180 days, etc. Furthermore, you can compare the current date/time range’s data to other date/time range in the past.

Visitor Segmentation – One of the most desired and worthwhile features is visitor segmentation. It is, in fact, a filtering option, which let you see the statistics for a specific group of visitors’ types (visitor’s segment) instead of seeing it at a lower resolution, where all the data is combined together. Being able to make segmentation of your data, really help the web analytics consultant/expert, understand the visitor’s behavior.

Many web analytics product vendors call it “Behavioral Analytics”. Being able to follow visitor’s segment behavior on your website, you can comprehend the source of trends within particular visitor’s segments. You can further and deeply follow your Internet campaign marketing efforts, etc. The misfortune relies with the fact that segmentation is badly implemented in many web analytics solutions. Clicky, on the other hand, made segmentation simple to use. Clicky utilizes segmentation by allowing data drill-down functionality in the UI and as the backbone architecture of its web analytics SaaS solution.

For example: If you are watching visits by country, and you want to see only the segment of visitors (filter) that visitors that came from The United Kingdom? – all you have to do is to click the country name link “The United Kingdom”, and you will be taken to a page, which shows all the related analytical information for that particular country. It is not as advanced as Google Analytics’ “Advanced-Segments”, and we wish that it had a tool for building custom segments by choosing a large variety of  dimensions and metrics parameters as Google provides.

Google’s Advanced Segments is a really valuable tool that every web analytics’ vendor should adopt. You can even easily share your custom advanced segment with other Google Analytics users by providing a single link (URL). The segment will then be directly imported into Google Analytics advanced segments edit page.

Compare Visitors’ Segments – Another advantage in visitor segmentation in Clicky, is that you can construct a comparison between one visitors segment to another. For example, if you want to compare analytical data between visitors from Germany and visitors from the United States, you can do that in few simple steps.

Of course you have the option to create segments/filtering, by adding data like Browser type, Language,  Operating system, Referring site, etc. There for you will get a more accurate presentation of a specific visitor’s segment, so you can analyze it independently from the other analytical data.

Twitter Analytics – Probably, one of the most appealing twitter analytics or some call it Twitter follower, built right inside Clicky web analytics service. It will give you rich insight of what’s happening in Twitter, which is associated to your website. This Clicky Twitter Analytics service allows you to track Twitter tweets. You can sort and filter and data collected from the tweets by the ones with backlinks to your website, those with questions, etc. Being able to track, analyze and respond directly (retweet) to particular tweets of a significance, makes Twitter Analytics in Clicky, a very valuable tool for following tweets in Twitter. Today we can see that marketers emphasize on Social Networking marketing strategies, especially on Twitter and Facebook.

Customized Tracking – Clicky’s tracking code can be highly customized to allow better interaction with your website for tracking additional analytical data. Clicky uses JSON object called ‘clicky_custom’. It enables you to manually log data using Javascript events or using internal scripts. To  take advantage of this feature, you will have to signup for a Clicky premium account, because these are pro features. Some of those custom tracking features includes: manually tagging a link as a download, outbound links (link that leads the visitor outside the site) or clicks (for example, sending email). You can track users sessions and store data specific for those users. This is a very powerful tool, which allows you to track each visitor, and instead of using their IP address or organization/hostname, you will use their username instead. You can see who’s logged on to your website and track visitor’s behavior more accurately.

Analytics API – Clicky Analytics API allows any customer to make data extraction from his site’s traffic data. It gives you the option to use the data in your own applications that you develop. Send standard HTTP GET request and receive the data in the following formats: XML, Javascript (JSON) , PHP and CSV. More information can be found on Clicky API help page.

Internet Campaigns Tracking – You can easily set up your campaign information in Clicky (under the Campaigns’ tab) and start tracking the efficiency of your campaigns and advertisements that you run for your website in different sites. Clicky enables you to set up both static and dynamic campaigns for ultimate versatility, gathering and tracking visitors, which came from specific campaigns.

There are many web analytics vendors who sell SaaS Real-time web analytics solution with few of those features. However, Clicky took the best practices, Usability and East-of-use, and created one of the best mass-market web analytics tools. With a clean and modern interface, many data export choices (also via RSS), real-time tracking and evaluating website traffic data, advanced data drill-down possibilities and segmentation, track Ajax and flash events, track goals and conversions, customized dashboard and much more. Clicky tracker also works when Javascript it turned off in the visitor’s browser, so you will get more accurate analytic data.

Here is a YouTube short video demonstration of GetClicky:

YouTube Preview Image

Clicky Subscription Plans

Clicky real-time web analytics is being offered in 5 different plans: Clicky Free, Blogger, Pro, Super Pro and Clicky Enterprise. There are differences between the plans: by the Number of web sites you can track, total daily page views tracked, data history and features. Even the free version of Clicky has many advantages in comparison to various paid or free web analytics solutions from favorite vendors like Woopra, Chartbear, Piwik, StatCounter and others. If you compare Clicky vs the other vendors’ web analytics solutions, you can clearly see some significant features that you can only find on Clicky.

I know that many of you will try to make feature comparison between Google Analytics vs Clicky (free/limited version), to see which on is better. Just remember that Google Analytics is not a real-time analytics solution and Clicky is. Of course there are features on Google Analytics that you won’t find on Clicky, but you should consider the UI, simplicity, real-time factor, Twitter Analytics and all the advantages that Clicky has that is important for your website/blog. It is very simple, pay a little bit more and get much more!

I have been visiting many web analytics forums, and I have read many great comments from many Analytics experts and consultants. It’s true that the main niche for this kind of product is small business and blog owners, but as we told you earlier in this Clicky review, there are some very-large traffic websites that use Clicky as their main web analytic tool. You won’t need any video guides, tutorials and webinars to start using the advanced features of Clicky. It became very popular because it is a simple real-time web analytics product. It is in the Top 10 Web Analytics products in many product comparison reviews.

On the main page inside Clicky account, you have several tabs: Home, visitors, locale, content, links, searches, goals, campaigns, spy, Twitter. Every tab exposes different options and functionality that are based on data query patterns that the site owner wants to query about. It actually narrows your view on the data, and let you concentrate  on specific segments of data.
When you set up Clicky Javascript code on more than one site, you can access in the same dashboard, without the need to enter the a specific account’s dashboard.

Clicky on Mobile Phone

You can access clicky from any mobile phone. The big advantage is it that you’ll get to see a mobilized version of the dashboard, graphs and cart, etc. Visit http://i.getclicky.com for the iPhone version site or for other mobile phones, visit http://m.getclicky.com. It is very cool watching real-time website statistical data on your mobile phone, try it, you’ll love it!

Woopra vs Clicky

The main competition will probably come from the newest kid on the block, Woopra. Woopra has been showing its muscles in the real-time analytics for small-medium businesses. However, Woopra is mostly based on its amazing desktop client, whether it’s SaaS implementation deserves more attention. The SaaS solution is very basic and is robust and full featured SaaS analytics solution in comparison to Clicky service. For in-depth information about Woopra, read our Woopra Review.

Nerveless, it is worth trying, especially if you search for a more stripped down solution, and you want one of the most attractive analytics clients out there on the market. What’s more, Woopra implemented a built in basic chat component, that you can use to take proactive measures and chat with visitors live in your website. If you search for the perfect combination between Live chat software and real-time web analytics product, you must read our WhosOn Review, live chat software and analytics All-In-One solution.

Clicky Global Marketshare

Clicky is such a popular product (the website too, currently 1,907 Alexa Traffic Rank), that some global market share statistical information is based on its global markershare shared reports and also, because it is among the few who share global statistical information about various metrics data like most popular browsers (without sharing private site’ information of course). Furthermore, Clicky gets a lot of attention because a Clicky user named Chris Nanney has developed a plugin for Google Chrome browsers called ClickyChrome, which utilizes Clicky API. It allows Chrome browser owners to see how many visitors are on any of their tracked websites right now. Clicking on the button in Google Chrome browser, will show you basic statistical information like: number of visitors, actions, average actions per visit, total time spent, an average time per visit, bounce rate and goals.

On GetClicky marketshare information page, you can find global marketshare statistics for web browsers, operating systems, search engines, mobile web browsers, mobile operating systems, mobile search engine, mobile phones, video game’s consoles and special reports for Motorola Droid and Nexus One mobile phones usage popularity.

Our Conclusion

There are many reasons why some popular websites have chosen to implement Clicky has their main website business performance management analytics solution.  Clicky analytics accumulates simplicity with top-notch features that some stand from the rest of the competition. It is for Every business who wants to implement a BI solution to prevent marketing strategy mistakes, gain knowledge about your online business, understand visitor behavior, keep track on Internet campaigns and advertisements and so on. Of course you can hire a web analytics consultant to analyze the data for you, but with Clicky, it just doesn’t give you any excuse, it is so easy to learn and master, that it is just a sin not to give it a try.

Some may call it a Web 2.0 Analytics solution, but Clicky is all about SIMPLICITY.  Even when in comparison to Woopra, Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Piwik, StatCounter and SiteMeter, Clicky brings unique features that really worth the asked affordable price. You have widgets that you can put on your website that extracts data from you account, official Clicky Wordpress plugin for easy integration with your Wordpress blog (requires Self-hosted version of WordPress 2.8 or higher) , Twitter Analytics, powerful Analytics API for traffic data extraction and much more.
If you want to get a better insight, you can try Clicky’s online Demo, to see all the features live on your screen.

For me, it was easy choosing Clicky analytics for few of my blogs, instead of Google Analytics, it was just fitted better in terms of the functions that I’ve wanted, such as Twitter Analytics for example and real-time stats. It did a great job keeping the balance between functionality and simplicity.

It works fluently without any bugs (as far as I’ve seen for the 5 months of usage). Indeed there are many very good real-time stats software for small sized online businesses, but you should compare the features and consider the benefits in having really unique and functional features, then you can see the advantage Clicky (GetClicky) has over its competitors. You can find more information about Clicky plan and prices on the official website getclicky.com.

GetClicky.com compete unique visitors chart

GetClicky.com - Estimated Unique Visitors (via compete.com)

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