PeC Review: Clicky Web Analytics

Web analytics newcomer Clicky offers real-time site data, Twitter activity, and custom data tracking for a nominal monthly fee, making it an attractive choice for some ecommerce businesses.

Web analytics have become the definitive means of measuring marketing campaigns and search engine optimization effectiveness for many online stores. If traffic slips, a site manager might start tweaking AdWords, or rewriting content to improve organic SEO, for example. With so much emphasis on analytics, it can be beneficial to pay a small fee for an analytics tool that provides features not available with free analytics solutions.

Developed by the folks at Roxr Software, Clicky can be an excellent choice for ecommerce marketers that use Twitter, the micro-blogging site, to promote their store, or are planning marketing campaigns that could benefit from advanced features like username tracking. That is why I am awarding Clicky four out of five stars in this The PeC Review.

The PeC Review is my weekly attempt to introduce you to the products and services I believe might help improve your ecommerce business. This week, I’ll tell you why I think Clicky might be a good web analytics solution for your site.

Real-time Analytics

The Internet may be the fastest moving medium that marketers have ever had to work with. If the right reviewer praises your store or your products, site traffic could spike in a matter of minutes. So it makes sense to use an analytics tool that works in real time.

Clicky, like many new web analytics tools, provides real-time data about the visitors to your site as it happens. In fact, the default view in the Clicky user interface is “Today.”

Twitter Analytics

Twitter is becoming an increasingly important site for ecommerce marketers who use the social network to announce daily discounts, contests, shipping offers, or similar promotions.

Clicky makes tracking your Twitter campaign’s success a lot easier, capturing data about your tweets, links, tags and more, from the same interface you use to manage your website data.

Customized Tracking

Many analytics users are familiar with creating custom strings to track incoming links from Google AdWords or other pay-per-click efforts. And, while Clicky offers a similar feature, it also allows developers to create a very specific customized tracking code using a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) object.

This custom tracking capability means that site owners can begin to track very specific individual session data, including associating a username or email address with that user’s specific on-site behavior. This feature can also be used to track asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) or Flash states. Clicky allows users to manually log data, too.

Goal and Campaign Tracking

Clicky lets users set up and monitor goals or campaigns, tracking conversion rates and costs or revenue in real time from a goal-tracking dashboard. Users can even include external pages in their campaign funnels.

FeedBurner RSS Statistics

Clicky can also track your FeedBurner-managed RSS feeds, helping to track how many users are clicking onto your site from your feed.

Pricing

Clicky offers five tiers of service. There is a free service that lets a user track data for a single domain with no more than 3,000 daily page views. This free service does not include some of Clicky’s more advanced features like Twitter analytics. The best choice for many ecommerce businesses would be the “Pro” service, which costs $9.99 per month and offers a good combination of value and features.

Summing Up

Real-time web analytics, Twitter analytics, and customizable tracking code make Clicky a good choice for marketers who want more from their data.