Clicky and Google Analytics – Friends or bitter enemies?

After spending some time getting to know Google Analytics, I signed up for a free Clicky account. The clock is a full-featured analytics suite with a simple, easy-to-use dashboard interface. For the first 21 days, Clicky provides their premium plan for up to three sites as a free trial. After that, Clicky will downgrade to the free plan, which provides analytics without charge for one site with under 3000 daily page views (clicky.com, 2014). Until this little blog takes off, Clicky can provide an analogue to the Google Analytics interface that gives me some additional in-depth information about my visitors and what they are doing on my site – all at no charge.

Some of the most significant features of Clicky are as follows:

Real-time Data

One of the most frustrating things about Google Analytics is that the stats is the delay in seeing information from your site (usually 24 hours) The main distinguishing feature of Clicky from Google Analytics is its real-time data feature, data appears as it happens rather than with the one-day delay common with GA. The setup is straightforward – copy and paste a tracking code into the blogger template – and almost immediately the data begins to flow in.

The dashboard is far more intuitive than Google Analytics, as most of the common data used is shown right up front in modules and can be adjusted to display what the user considers most important. Rather than having to navigate the site for visitor information, keywords and links, it’s all presented in a graceful one-page summary, and can be clicked for a deeper analysis of the data

Additionally, there is an automatic comparison with data for the previous period. Red or green percentage numbers appear to the right of each widget, giving an instant assessment of any change in the data. This can alert the user immediately to what is of note in the data. (Hall, 2014)

With real-time information, campaigns can be closely monitored and popular content can be observed and promoted in a more responsive manner. When trends are observed on a website, the user can optimize content on-the-fly and promote it in additional ways based on content searches.

Detailed Visitor Information

From the dashboard, Clicky allows you to view information about how many people are on your site, where they come from, the searches they made to arrive there, their referral sites and their search path through your site’s content. Additionally, Clicky can tell you what your ranking in google on your keywords was when someone clicked through to your website. This is not a unique service, but it is nice to have it within the analytics package.

Bounce Rate

Clicky’s bounce rate differs from other packages in its measurement, which is very blog-friendly. If a visitor spends five minutes on one page, it should not legitimately be called a bounce, particularly if it’s a link from a referring site (i.e. a blog post shared on Facebook). For those measuring traffic on blogs, where someone may look at a single article and then go away, this makes sense.

The Bounce definition according to the Clicky website:

“A visitor who has only one pageview, and who is on your site for less than 30 seconds is what we now consider a bounce. So any visitor who has more than one pageview, or any visitor who has only one pageview but is on your site for at least 30 seconds, is now what we consider "engaged" / not a bounce.

“Since Clicky now sends pings, we can measure how long each visitor is actually online. This is a much more accurate representation of how many of these visitors actually "bounced" from your site, versus how many actually stayed online long enough to read what you had to say. Because of this, we think we now have the best bounce rate metric in the industry (clicky.com, 2014).”

On-site heat maps

One of Clicky's standout features is its heat-mapping capabilities, which shows users an overall view of what visitors are doing and whether the website traffic is where is should be. The heat-map shows where visitors are clicking on pages, and can be segmented by other data like target audiences to see if visitors are seeing what you want them to see. They can operate in real time, directly on the page being viewed (Angeles, 2014). It’s a convenience to not have to go outside the analytics package to engage a heat map service.

The Onsite Analytics Widget

Once you’ve signed up for Clicky they’ll give you a short code to add to your site and you’ll begin to see a button like this:

The icon is only visible to you when you’re logged in to Clicky -- no one else can see it but you won’t have to go to another website in order to see a bunch of your statistics. You can click from inside the site to show the heat map, select the date range, as well as a direct link to the Clicky dashboard.

Additional Features

In addition to these standouts, Clicky offers alerts for special events based on triggers like new visitors, goals, campaigns and referrals, it’s mobile-friendly, and offers analytics for external social sites such as YouTube and Twitter. Once again, these are not as robust of analytics as the sites themselves offer, but the amalgam of the data in one place is highly beneficial for an overview.

This tool is great because it allows you to see where people are arriving from in real time (unlike Google) so you can monitor any news stories or big new mentions that you’ve had around the web. It’s always nice to know what’s going on so you can go and interact, respond, etc.

In Summary

Clicky seems to be more well suited to smaller sites. With larger websites there is a lot more data to analyze for broader trends that would simply overwhelm the Clicky analytics. Its easy-to-use interface and well-labeled features, however, make it accessible right from the start, unlike Google Analytics. With it’s filters and reports and dashboards, and their subsequent menus and submenus it’s easy to get lost without feeling as though you are harnessing all of its potential.

Choosing Clicky as an addition to Google Analytics, (especially for a blog) is a fast way to learn about the potential for an analytics package and discover more about what you should observe on your site.

For a full rundown of how Clicky compares with google analytics, you can read a feature-by-feature comparison here: clicky.com/compare/google