What is the best way to monitor, analyze, and react to your blog or web site's traffic in real time?

Real Time Web Analytics, Clicky Website Statistics

This is a common question that I even struggled with as a website owner, and statistic nut. The answer is simple - Get Clicky. After trying monitoring program after program (including: Google Analytics, StatCounter and W3counter) I stubled upon Clicky and my world changed. I was suddenly able to see who was coming to my site, in real time, and with REAL information. I know who, where they came from, what they did on my site, how long they stayed and a whole lot more.



Another selling point to me was the length of time that I can report on. I have sites that have nearly a year of data that I can report on (in fact most reports can actually show up to 366 days worth of data is you so choose - That's a HUGE value.



The cost of Clicky ranges from Free for a basic account to many responably priced options for Pro accounts. Try it now FREE



The real time advantage


Clicky is a real time web analytics service. This means that when you login and view your stats, 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.



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 in Clicky 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.
If instead you relied solely on a service like Google Analytics, it would be up to 24 hours before you even knew about the traffic, and by then it would be too late to do anything about it.



Today vs. Past
Clicky is focused on real time, so by default we only show you the data from "today" when you login to view your stats. Historical data is of course available, however. Just click the blue drop down menu in the top right corner to get the menu shown to the right hand side.
Common choices such as yesterday and the last 30 days are available as default options. You can also view a custom date or date range by clicking the last item in the menu, "Custom date range...". With this option, you can view a date range for any report with up to 1 year of data. The exception is the Visitor log and the Action log pages - these are limited to 31 days maximum.



Viewing the history for an individual page, search term, referring domain, etcAs mentioned in the previous section, you can view almost any report with up to a full year's worth of data. However, doing so just gives you the total sum for any individual item over that entire date range. What if you want to view up to a year's worth of history for any individual item? This is possible with just a single click, and is one off the most useful features of Clicky!



Below is an example of part of your site's 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.



Visitor segmentationSegmentation is a fancy word for filtering. It means that instead of seeing data for all of your visitors combined, you can view just a specific "segment" of them.
Segmentation gives you priceless insight into your visitor's behavior, but the problem is that this feature is very difficult to use in most services. This is unfortunate, as this data is extremely valuable to any web site owner. Therefore, we set out to make segmentation as easy as possible.
Essentially every report you look at, each item's name will be a link.



Twitter Analytics


A lot of people are talking about you and/or your web site. But do you know what they're saying? It's hard to keep track of it all. That's why we created the best Twitter Analytics service on the planet, and built it right into Clicky. You simply enter in keywords that you want to monitor on Twitter, we'll automatically do the rest for you, creating beautiful reports like the one below.



You can filter the individual tweets by all sort of criteria (e.g. ones containing links, one with questions, ones with a positive tone), and you can reply or retweet directly from Clicky.