Website Analytics: Are You Tracking or Guessing?

Marketing your web site WITHOUT a solid web statistics software is like throwing darts in the wind. Are you tracking or guessing with your web site marketing efforts?  If you’re not tracking where each of your web site visitors is coming from, i.e. which search engines, social sites, link partners, etc you’re guessing, and you should never guess with your marketing dollars. Enter Clicky. Clicky is a real time website analytics service. This means that when you login and view your analytics, you are seeing up to the minute data on the traffic to your web site. Most services don’t let you see what’s happening “today” until the day after. Clicky Web Analytics is the brainchild of the Roxr team, founded in late 2006, and based in Portland, OR, USA.   Clicky is directly tracking more than 200,000 web sites, and an additional 500,000+ through their partners and licensees. So why all the buzz about real time web site stats? Real time data lets you react to changes in your traffic as they occur. For example, if you had an article that hit the front page of a popular site like digg.com, you would see the traffic spike immediately, along with links back to the sources sending you the traffic. Knowing this, you could make changes to your site or to the article itself to take advantage of the situation. When you sign up with Clicky, you’ll get a dashboard that shows you the types of traffic sources to your web site. Each item has a number next to it representing how many visitors arrived from that type of traffic source. To the right of that number is what’s called the “trend” for that item, vs the day before, taking into account the current time of day. (Green percentages are “good”, and red are “bad”. Green usually means “more”, but sometimes more is bad). To view the history for any item, simply click on the trend percentage, as shown below. By default you will see the last 30 days of data for that item, but there is a date drop down menu right above the graph which lets you view the daily values for up to 180 days, or the weekly sums for 26 weeks (half a year), or the monthly sums for the last 12 months. Some data types also support hourly data.

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Wondering how Clicky stacks up against web analytics providers?

Check out this chart below which gives you a birds-eye perspective of how they are different than the other top web stats services. http://getclicky.com/compare/

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If you are looking for one of the best real-time analytics systems on the web, we highly recommend Clicky web statistics! Check them out today, and tell them The Search Engine Pros sent you.

2 Responses

  • Guessing your website’s analytics is definitely a no-no! I couldn’t understand why some marketers are thinking this way too. Like what you’ve said, they are throwing darts in the wind.

    Knowing your website’s analytics can help you a lot in improving your site’s performance. For example, it enables you to determine where your visitors are coming from (country, website, etc.). It makes gathering keywords for SEO so much easier, and you would know the right target audience that you should engage with. However, you do need a platform that you can trust, and I’m glad that you’ve recommended Clicky since it is a reputable service. Marketers should definitely give this platform a try.

  • I have been looking for something that would help me properly track and analyze my website marketing efforts. Thank you for introducing this information for us to check out. Unfortunately, I am one of the people who throw darts in the wind when it comes to tracking my marketing efforts for my business. I usually just trust and believe that what I am putting out will bring me the traffic and business that I am needing. I also appreciate you showing how it stacks against other types of web analytic tracking programs. I think I will have to go ahead and give Clicky a chance!

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