One tool I have been using since first stumbling upon them 5+ years ago is Clicky – Web Analytics (formally GetClicky).
In this Clicky Review and Guide I will show you;
- Why Clicky is a great alternative to Google Analytics
- Setting up Campaigns and Goals
- A real-life example of how I make more money using Clicky
- A COMPLETE GUIDE to all of the cool features
N.B – All screenshots were taken from the Clicky Analytics dashboard and are used to provide a visual guide to you the reader. Some of the links below are affiliate links and I will receive a commission should you purchase after clicking on my link. Thanks!
Why Bother With Analytics?
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
If you have websites that are not actively tracked and analyzed, you could be leaving money on the table.
Exploring alternatives to Google Analytics can provide additional insights and features tailored to different business needs. With the right analytics in place, you can make informed decisions that drive revenue and improve user engagement.
My Real Life Example
Around 12 months back a niche site I had built began to gain some traction in the organic listings, I wasn’t actively building loads of backlinks, just a few every now and then. When I started to see a few AdSense clicks here and there I stepped up the SEO and saw an immediate increase in earnings.
This ticked along nicely for a few months and I left it alone. I can’t remember what it was, perhaps something on TV, that prompted me to check on the site and how it was performing.
I hopped on over to Clicky and entered the dashboard. Whilst prodding around I took a look at the heat map for this particular site and noticed a substantial amount of traffic (22%) was clicking on a link that was way below the fold. Now, this link was something I though kind of irrelevant in this niche which is why it was so far down the page.
Just goes to show how wrong you can be!
What I did was act on this and I moved the link to the top of the sidebar navigation. A week later I checked the stats again and even more people were clicking this link. I had basically stumbled upon a sub-niche of my main niche that my visitors were clearly interested in.
The sub-niche lent itself well to training materials such as books and DVD’s so I added an Amazon widget and tracked the stats closely for the next few weeks. Needless to say, that widget is still there to this day and pulls in an additional $50 per month that would have otherwise been left on the table.
From that point on I made it a priority to analyze my analytics for any site I own on a frequent basis.
So What Is Clicky and Why Use It?
Simply put, Clicky is a web analytics tool who’s aim is to provide real-time traffic stats. They also have a pretty comprehensive table which shows exactly why they are the best.
How to Set Up Tracking
Clicky offers 3 types of tracking code;
1 – Standard Tracking Code
This will be sufficient for the majority of us and is super easy to implement. I use the Clicky Plugin by Yoast which requires just 3 pieces of information, all of which are available by clicking on Preferences –> Tracking Code in the Clicky dashboard.
Be sure to untick the “Affiliate badge” in the top right corner if you wish to remove the small Clicky banner that will appear in the footer of your site.
2 – Asynchronous Tracking Code
This means that tracking can be done at the same time as rendering other content and therefore won’t delay other page content from rendering. Which basically means it should be quicker and not affect your site load speed.
3 – Non-JavaScript Tracking Code
Basically, don’t use this code unless you absolutely have to!
Pricing Options
On signing up with Clicky you get a free 30 day Trail to their Pro account which gives you the chance to try out cool features such as heat maps, track downloads, campaign & goal tracking and email reports.
After the 30 day trial, however, unlike most online tools, you can continue with the free account forever (with reduced functionality of course).
There are also three paid options available, the right one for you will depend on the volume of sites you wish to track and the functionality your require.
Pro – $9.99 /month ($79.99 /year)
- Websites – 10
- Daily Page Views – 30,000
- Premium features – ALL
Pro Plus – $14.99 /month ($119.99 /year)
- Websites – 10
- Daily Page Views – 30,000
- Premium features – ALL
- Additional features – Heat maps and Uptime monitoring
Pro Platinum – $19.99 /month ($159.99 /year)
- Websites – 10
- Daily Page Views – 100,000
- Premium features – ALL
- Additional features – Heat maps and Uptime monitoring
There is also a custom package available offering a variable monthly tariff to suit your personal needs. This package is tailored to you and is geared to those tracking 50 domains and over, or where page views exceed 100,000 / day.
The Clicky Interface
This section will take you through the various features of the Clicky interface and how you can use them to your advantage.
The Dashboard
The dashboard is where it all begins. Each site has its own dashboard from which you can analyze and track the darkest corners of your website.
The dashboard is designed to provide a high-level overview of the current happenings on your site, allowing you to easily compare days, weeks and months.
From tracking visitors and page views to bounce rate and popular content. You can pretty much make do with just the dashboard in the majority of cases. However Clicky is much more than just an analytics dashboard.
Clicky’s job is to be the best real-time analytics solution – a job it does very well.
Visitors
The visitor’s section tells us a lot about who is coming to our site and the number of actions they are taking. We can also follow those actions through step-by-step.
Visitor Log
The visitor log is a summary showing the details for each user (ISP) visiting your site.
We are presented with the time of visit, country of origin, total time spent on site and referring source, be that Organic, Referral, Social etc.
The stand out metric available on this page by far is the number of actions each user takes. Clicking the hyperlink will take us to the Action Log for that user.
Action log
The next piece of information we get by clicking on the user (ISP) in the action log.
This information is all about the user, their location, IP address, browser platform and a nice little Google map pin pointing where they reside!
We are also provided with the visit date and time and how long the actual session lasted along with a number of actions taken and the page they landed on when first arriving.
TIP – I use the landing page metric to help determine which keywords are pulling in the most traffic.
With Google moving to a 100% (Not Provided) world, we need all the help we can get to understand which search terms are generating our organic traffic.
The third and final section in the Action log shows the visitor path – or to put it better, how the user flows through our website.
I love using this feature to give me a great understanding on how my visitors interact with my website, where they click and which pages they visit and then leave.
I have used this to add additional “calls to action” to pages that were leaking the most traffic. If we can get them to click on just one more page, post or offer then we will improve our time on site, bounce rate, and earnings potential.
Engagement (actions)
The number of actions each user takes is categorized on the Engagement (Actions) tab.
This metric reveals the engagement of your users by looking at the number of actions they take. The higher the number of actions the better. (unless you have an Adsense site of course in which case 1 action and a click of an Ad is all we need)
The number of actions can also be broken down further by clicking on the hyperlink to revel the actual users who made that number of actions.
Engagement (time)
Like the actions tab, the Time Engagement metric is also a great indicator of the stickability of your website.
Generally speaking, if we are growing a blog or community, the longer time on site the better. This will obviously differ for AdSense sites of course, where you want the visitor to click an ad on your site.
There are many ways we can increase the time a user spends on our site. Some are free and some come at a cost;
1 – Increase Content-Length
Neil Patel wrote a great article on how content length can affect rankings and conversions.
In summary his study found that the average number of words for a webpage ranking in the top 10 on Google was 2,000. The higher the ranking, the more content was on the page. Sounds simple and it really is.
2 – Internal Linking
Whenever you write a piece of content, make sure you are linking out to you other related content. By providing these links or calls-to-action, you will keep the reader engaged.
3 – Related Articles
The most popular plugin for displaying related posts on WordPress sites is by far YARPP with 2.6m downloads. On this blog I use UpPrev, which you will see pop up as you near the end of this post.
UpPrev differs to YARPP as it only shows your previous post, whereas YARPP shows a number of related posts at the end of each article (that number can be defined by you).
Both of these plugins are great for ‘suggesting’ to the reader another article for them to read and it saves them the hassle of clicking the back button to get to your homepage to find another piece of content.
4 – Site Loading Time
How many times have you been surfing the web and clicked away from a webpage simply because the content was taking too long to load? I wrote an article on how to decrease site load time by 75%.
By following these steps you will speed up your site which will in-turn improve engagement and remove the likelihood of that pesky back button being clicked!
5 – Adding Video
Online video popularity has grown immensely in recent years. With YouTube becoming the 2nd biggest search engine in the world, it’s clear that web users love video.
The appeal is obvious and it’s the reason many people sit glued to their TV screen each evening. Many people turn to video as a way to learn something new, if you include a video in your content you have more chance of increasing time on site.
Most Active Visitors
This section allows you to see who your stalkers are…no seriously, It provides the IP address of your most active users based on the number of actions taken.
A pretty cool resource if someone is stealing your content and images…you get their IP address.
Traffic Sources
This feature provides a good overview of your traffic sources broken down into the various avenues.
N.b – the “Advertising” source in the above example is actually a referring URL I have set which was a guest post. So it’s not actually a paid Ad.
We can use this metric to watch our site grow in both organic searches and social media as time goes on and your websites popularity grows.
Content
The content section shows us everything we need to understand which pages, posts, and categories are popular amongst our readers. By looking at the exit pages, for example, we can see which pages on our site leak the most traffic.
This allows us to actively target that page and make improvements which can then be split test over a period of time.
Pages
The key metric here shows us the number of times a page has been viewed. This helps us to understand which information our audience is most attracted too and potential areas we can enhance/improve upon.
This is also a great metric to use when looking for future article ideas. How your older content performed gives us a good feel for what topics your audience wants to see and read.