Clicky: A Google Analytics Alternative

Prompt:

Based on what you have learned and your experiences with GA to date, identify and research one other web analytic tool in the marketplace and offer a brief review along with a compare/contrast to the functionality within GA.

In this course we’ve learned the basics of Google Analytics, a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website’s performance. While it is perhaps the most commonly used, particularly for beginners such as the students in my IMC 642 class, it is certainly not the only option that the owner of a site has to measure their progress and success.

When selecting an analytics tool for your blog, commerce site or other website, it’s important to do the following:

-List out the goals you need to achieve. Check to make sure the specific tool you’re looking at can help you achieve that goal.

-Check to see if the service is easy to understand and use.

-Check to see if it fits within your budget.

-Check to see if it has a free trial period (especially if it is NOT a free service!)

(Fernando, 2012.)

Clicky is an excellent alternative, as it is praised for being very user friendly. This is important to me because, as the title of my blog emphasizes, I am a novice when it comes to SEO. This is probably the biggest advantage Clicky has over Google Analytics. Clicky displays website visitor information in an easily understandable way, and unlike Google Analytics, it displays a live view of every visitor activity on the site (Fernando, 2014.) For those of you unfamiliar with Google Analytics, GA has a lag time of about 1 day to display information. That means if something big is happening on your website today (like your blog post about Clicky went viral, for example), you won’t be able to know until tomorrow! As soon as you enter Clicky, it shows you an automatic comparison of today’s data versus the previous reporting period to give you an instant assessment of how your metrics have changed (Hall, 2014.) This same functionality is available in Google Analytics, however, one must root around to find it. Clicky makes it easy (Ewer, 2013.) Knowing this can be very beneficial to the internet marketer, because being able to make sense of what’s happening right now can allow you to make good reactionary decisions, and you won’t be too late to capitalize on trends.

The second biggest advantage Clicky has over GA in my opinion, is its ability to provide super-specific information on individual website visitors. Detailed information like IP address, Internet Service Provider (ISP), location, operating system (Mac or PC), web browser (Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.), website referrer, visit length and actions taken during a specific visit, just to name a few (Angeles, 2014.)

“For example, if you expand the visitor data, you can see how many people looked at pages, how many downloaded items, how many followed outbound links, viewed media or triggered other events,” (Hall, 2014.) And the way that Clicky gathers its data is different from other services such as Google Analytics in a number of meaningful ways.

For example: When using Clicky, your own personal traffic to your website is ignored by default (FAQ, n.d.) Why is this important? Well, last week on my IMC 642 class discussion board, many of my classmates discussed the efficacy of various web metrics, this one included. As a site owner and operator, you are likely to spend a lot of time on your own site! But your heightened activity is not the norm for others coming to check your site out. So, your own activity can skew your data, and make you think you’re doing better than you really are. That’s why Clicky leaves you out of the equation all together, so you can more accurately see what activity is occurring on your site.

Another difference in functionality between Google Analytics and Clicky is the definition of the bounce rate. Traditionally, the “bounce rate” refers to the rate of visitors who view only one page on your site, and then leave. A high bounce rate has a negative connotation. However, this metric was a hotbed for discussion on my class discussion board last week. That’s because this definition (which is used by Google Analytics and many  others) does not take into account the type of action that is being performed on one page. For example, on blogs like this one, the whole point is to read the article (thank you for doing so, by the way) and then leave to go on your merry way. But if you’ve taken the 10 minutes it requires to read this, it sure isn’t fair to say that your visit was a “bounce,” or a failed attempt of mine to get your attention. If you’ve read the information, that’s what I wanted you to do, and therefore it’s a success, even though it technically counts as a bounce.

I think it’s pretty silly. So does Clicky.

With a paid account from clicky ($9.99/month), the service can continue to gather data on site visitors in order to get an accurate picture of how successful the visitor’s visit was in regard to achieving the site owner’s goals. In Clicky terms, a bounce is only a bounce when someone views a single webpage AND they were on the website for less than 30 seconds (FAQ, n.d.)

Another difference includes that Clicky only counts one referrer per visitor, which provides a more accurate picture of where the bulk of your traffic is coming from.

Clicky admits that they do things differently than many other trackers do, and admit that it can cause some minor confusion at first. However, they stand behind it as a way to give users a better analytics experience (FAQ, n.d.)

Aside from measuring metrics differently than other analytics services, Clicky has a few other attributes that distinguish it from Google Analytics. It offers Twitter analytics by monitoring and summarizing any mention of you/your brand on Twitter. It doesn’t require using Flash, so it can be easily used on mobile devices. Unlike Google Analytics, there is an iPhone app for the service (Fernando, 2014.)

They also offer customers an alert system that notifies users of specific events that occur on their website, so that they never miss out on important information. This means that the site owner can get a notification when things like new visitors, achieved goals, or new referral traffic comes to their site (Angeles, 2014.)

Clicky offers easy to read heat maps. A heat map shows the highest concentrations of places where visitors are clicking on your webpage (Ramsay, 2014.) Additionally, these heat maps can be segmented by anticipated goal or by visitor sessions (Angeles, 2014.)

And lastly, one of the biggest differences between the two services that puts Clicky on top is its ability to install a Clicky widget right on your own website. This means that once you install this widget into the HTML code on your bog, you can view (almost) all the analytics I’ve discussed thus far, right in the corner of your very own page, without having to go to Clicky’s website and logging on to their service (Ramsay, 2014.) This means users don’t have to toggle back and forth between their own website and that of their analytics provider. Convenience at its finest.

But, as with anything, there are cons to the service. Most notably, Clicky is not great for bigger websites, and it does not allow for step by step tracking of keyword traffic, which Google Analytics does offer (Fernando, 2014.) However, neither of these affect me or my little blog, so I really wouldn’t mind!

Below is a chart that shows how Clicky stacks up to Google Analytics in a number of areas.

In summary, it seems like Clicky is an excellent alliterative for users who are not overly technical when it comes to website analytics - like me! I know how to take data that I understand and use it in a way to make good strategic decisions. But, if I don’t clearly understand the data, how am I supposed to do that? Because Clicky appears to offer an uncluttered and intuitive experience, it sounds good to me!

You can check out a complete guide to Clicky Analytics here if you’d like more information.

Cheers!

References:

Angeles, S. (2014.) 3 Google Analytics alternatives (and why you should use them.) Business News Daily. Retrieved Sunday, February 2015 from http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6090-google-analytics-alternatives.html

Ewer, T. (2013.) Why I use Clicky Analytics instead of Google. Leaving Work Behind Blog. Retrieved Saturday, February 14 2015 from http://leavingworkbehind.com/clicky-web-analytics/

Hall, S. (2014.) Analytics update: Do you need a second analytics package? The Daily Egg  - Conversion Optimization and A/B Testing Tips. Retrieved Saturday, February 14 2015 from http://blog.crazyegg.com/2014/06/03/clicky-web-analytics/

FAQ http://clicky.com/help/faq/tips/different

Fernando, D. (2014.) 10 Web analytics tools: Analytical tools other than Google Analytics. WooRank Blog. Retrieved Saturday, February 14 2015 from http://blog.woorank.com/2014/07/10-web-analytics-tools-analytical-tools-other-than-google-analytics/

Ramsay. (2014.) A review of Clicky Analytics (and why it beats Google.) Blog Tyrant. Retrieved Sunday, February 15 2015 from http://www.blogtyrant.com/a-review-of-clicky-analytics-and-why-it-beats-google/