Site Updates and Clicky

Posted by kimonostereo on July 5, 2008 11:11 PM

The other night I finally got around to updating the navigation menu here on the website. You'll find that it's easier to get to certain parts of the site that were once hidden away. For example, "Extras" now contains an easier way to get to the various extra fun and stuff we have scattered all over the site. I'm still working on it and I hope to have most of it completed by the end of the weekend.

Clicky Web 2.0 Analytics
Over the last few months I've been investigating different strategies to help me optimize our website. While I have been using services such as Sitemeter and Google Analytics, I wanted something that gave me real-time data in a format that is easy to read. So I ventured out into the internets and did some research. There were a handful of interesting web analytics software out there and I signed up for accounts on all of them just to give them a try.

I've been using Clicky analytics for the past two months here on nemu-nemu.com and it's been a really great service so far! The great thing about Clicky is it's easy to use, customizable dashboard that gives you a look at your websites traffic at a glance. Unlike some other analytics sites, this one has a very nice, web 2.0 design, and best of all the stats are served up in real time.

Clicky dashboard_small.gif

At first I didn't think Clicky could offer me more than my combination of Sitemeter and Google Analytics but it really has a ton more features than both of them combined. The best part for me is that Clicky has real usable features that I can understand and use without thinking too much. Google analytics is nice but I really have to drill down to get information, and site meter is quite limited in many other ways. Clicky has flash based charts to show daily visitor counts and what they term "Actions", which is their version of page views. It's very easy to get a overall view of everything going on from recent visitors (country of origin & ISP), traffic sources (direct bookmark, email, rss feed, etc), referrer links, and search engine search terms all on the dashboard.

clicky visitor_small.gif

One of the more unique / cool features is the "spy" feature which allows you to see users visiting your site in real time. This is quite similar to watching the access log for your web server but in a format that has all that detailed information nicely parsed and displayed for you. True story: Clicky helped me identify a user (or maybe it was a bot) that would come to the site each day at a certain time and reload a single comic page over and over again for hours. This bot/virus/person was not only causing excessive bandwith waste but it was also messing up our daily stats. That IP got blocked every day thanks to Clicky!

Another cool feature is that you can access your site stats via RSS feed and there is also a developer API for you devheads who want to hack your own back end to Clicky. The RSS feeds are really cool because I don't even have to open up clicky to see whats going on with the site stats. Just subscribe to the feed via any RSS reader.

Check out Clicky for yourself if you're running a website of your own. There's a free 30 day trial to see if it fits your needs, to try it out click here for Clicky!


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