Clicky - A Web Analytics Tool

 If you are going to have a website for your business, you need to have a web analytics tool. This is crucial in order to measure the impact of your organization’s online presence, monitor your traffic, better the user experience, and ultimately, optimize the ROI of your website to promote the overall success of your brand. To have a website without the ability to measure its performance is to be like “a general engaging the opposition sans intelligence” (“Clicky Web Analytics,” n.d.). While there are many web analytics tools out there to help provide the intelligence you need to lead your brand to success, choosing the right one for your business will give you the insight needed to not only optimize your online performance, but to succeed against your competitors in the marketplace.

      Clicky is a web analytics tool that provides a wide scope of measurements and reports while touting a simple, user-friendly interface (“Live Demo,” n.d.). Like Google Analytics, the tool offers an easily navigable dashboard with detailed information about visitors, traffic sources, visit characterization metrics, engagement measurements, and visitor behavior that can be segmented across multiple platforms, browsers, locale, and more. Both tools are user friendly in that they do not require any code to be written to generate these reports. However, the option to write custom reports is also available to give the user more in-depth analysis if desired. With mobile versions and real time reporting, Clicky’s basic, free package gains more premium features with each upgrade on the pay scale. This tool, while comparable to Google Analytics, offers additional and more extensive features that set it apart in the web analytics marketplace, but these come at a cost.

(Oberoi, 2015)

The Differences between Clicky and Google Analytics

      Clicky carves out a unique spot for itself within the web analytics tools marketplace because of its ability to provide real-time traffic intelligence for each individual user on the site at the moment of analysis (“Clicky vs The Other Guys,” n.d.). Not only does Clicky offer this moment-by-moment reporting, but it also provides an incredibly detailed profile for each unique visitor to the site in all of the tool’s packages.

(“Live Demo,” n.d.)

      Clicky’s onsite analytics widget lets analysts view which individuals are on the site at the moment and also provides real time heat maps of their actions (more on this later). Online analytics shows the actions of each user, along with their time on site and landing page.

("Clicky vs Google Analytics," n.d.)

      While Google Analytics certainly provides the same analysis of visitor behavior, Clicky provides all aggregate visitor behavior in one view, segmented by visitor. By providing an in-depth analysis of each visitor, online marketers can see all the behaviors per average visitor (and per visitor whose behavior is farther out-lying) and can more easily group together these unique visitors to create enhanced segmentation options. This kind of report gives the analyst a granular view into the behavior of the visitor and allows for pattern realization across visitors who share common characteristics (like locale, browser, etc).

(“Live Demo,” n.d.)

      Clicky’s heat map feature is one of the tool’s most distinguished offerings. Available for the Pro Plus, Pro Platinum, and Custom packages, heat maps show all visitor clicks per each page of the website being tracked (“Pricing,” n.d.). Many other analytics tools, specifically Google Analytics, do not offer heat mapping as a feature in any of their packages, leaving users to begin the messy process of combining tools to garner complete result. Because “heat mapping answers many questions other analytical tools do not,” Clicky is jumping ahead of its competitors by compiling this feature with its others all in one tool (“The Importance of Heat Mapping,” 2016). Heat mapping can show analysts why there are dips in average time per session or increases in engagement on certain pages because they reveal where users are (or are not) clicking on a page. If users aren’t scrolling far enough down to come to your call to action, that may explain a low conversion rate, for example. Heat maps show which displays or content are garnering the most engagement, can reveal how your visitors are interacting with embedded media, or may reveal where there are wasted clicks on features that aren’t contributing to important goals (Bestor, 2016).

(“Clicky vs Google Analytics,” n.d.)

     

      Lastly, Clicky stands out in its foresight to include basic, time-saving factors built into its user interface. By default, Clicky “aggressively filters out bots from being logged” so analysts can view traffic coming from real visitors. In comparison, Google Analytics does not block bots automatically, and many more steps must be taken to eliminate bot traffic from being recorded in reports (Moore, 2015). By default, Clicky also blocks traffic from your own site by setting a cookie on your browser to ignore your own visits and has measures in place to track visitors who have Javascript disabled (“How Clicky is Different,” n.d.). With these default settings, Clicky saves its users both time and aggravation in setting up these measures that are usually desired by most users anyway.

      With other premium features like uptime monitoring, Google search rankings, Twitter analytics, alerts, and more, Clicky undoubtedly offers a wide array of features for the amateur and professional online marketer. However, Clicky’s basic package is much more limited than Google Analytics' basic package. According to Oberoi (2015), Clicky’s free version will only track one website, whereas Google Analytics can track 100 accounts (not even counting how many individual websites are tracked per account). Other seemingly basic features like goal setting, sub-user accounts, and path analysis are only included in pricier packages (“Pricing,” n.d.). And overall, Google Analytics has a higher user satisfaction (96%) than Clicky (93%) (Compare, 2016).

      In conclusion, Clicky is a comparable alternative to Google Analytics. With the same basic measurements and metric reports, both tools are helpful resources for those who are looking to optimize their online presence and promote growth and success for their brand. Ultimately, online marketers must determine which tool is most cost effective for them based on their brand’s specific needs.

 References

Bestor, S. (2016, May 3). How heat maps actually work (and how to set them up today). Sumome.com. Retrieved from https://sumome.com/stories/how-heat-maps-work

Clicky vs. Google Analytics. (n.d.). Clicky.com. Retrieved from https://clicky.com/compare/google

Clicky Web Analytics. (n.d.). Cloudfare.com. Retrieved from https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/clicky/

Compare Google Analytics vs. Clicky. (2016, October 23). Financesonline.com. Retrieved from https://comparisons.financesonline.com/google-analytics-vs-clicky

How Clicky is different from other trackers. (n.d.). Clicky.com. Retrieved from https://clicky.com/help/faq/tips/different

Live Demo. (n.d.). Clicky.com. Retrieved from https://clicky.com/stats/?site_id=32020

Moore, A. (2015, April 1). Eliminating bot traffic from Google Analytics once and for all. Lumametrics.com. [Blog]. Retrieved on February 5, 2017 from http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2015/04/01/eliminating-bot-traffic-from-google-analytics-once-and-for-all/

Oberoi, A. (2015, August 2). The top 31 best web analytics tools | Google Analytics alternative. Adpushup.com. [Blog]. Retrieved on February 5, 2017 from https://www.adpushup.com/blog/web-analytics-tools-google-analytics-alternatives/

Pricing. (n.d.). Clicky.com. Retrieved from https://clicky.com/help/pricing

The importance of heat mapping for truly effective website design. (2016, June 30). Byte-technology.com. [Blog]. Retrieved on February 5, 2017 from http://byte-technology.com/blog/the-importance-of-heat-mapping-for-truly-effective-website-design/