If you already own our own blog or website, you have surely used some sort of hit counter to track the number of hits to your website (just for bragging rights right?). There are tons of free services out there that provide services beyond hit tracking, like referral tracking, visitor information, etc. Choosing one that serves all your needs can be messy and the easiest way is to install more than 1 analytics software into your blog or website.

Personally, I would recommend 2 web analytics service that I am using at the moment. I find these services to have comprehensive features, and also complement each other well. The two services I will be recommending are Google Analytics and Clicky Web Analytics.

Google Analytics

Overview

Google Analytics is totally free with your Gmail account, you just need to sign up and paste the tracking code into your template. I use Google Analytics because it provides me with all the necessary statistics that I need, plus more. For example, I like to the world map view on where my traffic comes from, and I can even drill down to each country’s map for the statistics. Most of the time, the statistics can be drilled down all the way to the city level, so that you can analyze your traffic and figure out where your visitors are from.

Feature List

The following are the list of features which I find important, but the feature list is certainly not limited to the below.

• Track the number of visits and pageviews
• Track the bounce rate and average time the user spent on the site
• Visual Map to see where your visitors are from
• Visitor loyalty and the depth of visit (how many pages viewed per visit)
• Browser and network capabilities of the users
• Statistics on referrer traffic
• Statistics on search engine traffic
• Top Landing pages
• Most popular pages
• and much more

Note

Note that although Google Analytics is extremely full featured, the statistics are delayed by a day. This can be a major disadvantage to some people, as they would like to track their traffic in real-time. That is why, I always use another web analytics service that provides real time traffic data, which brings me to my next recommendation:

Clicky Web Analytics

Overview

Clicky is a free service that allows you to collect real time data on the traffic to your website. Clicky has a pretty extensive feature list as well, which can probably rival Google Analytics. What I like most about Clicky, and the feature that immediately drew me in was the Spy feature, where I could see a list of visitors interacting in real time on my site. So far, I have not seen any web analytics that does this, and it really blows me away.

Click on the thumbnail to view the Spy feature in Clicky

Feature List

So far I have not seen anything that Google Analytics has that Clicky does not have.

I have already explained the Spy feature above where you are provided with real time action that the visitors are currently taking while on your site. You get to see where they are clicking, and what is interesting to them. This would be useful in checking to see what your visitors are most interested in at that exact moment on your blog, and this would allow you to fine tune your content further to keep the visitors in your website.

Another great feature is the most active visitors statistics. This will show you the list of users that visit your site the most often. To make it more human-readable, you can even rename the IP address of the visitor to a name that you can identify with. Then you’ll know that good ‘ol fella from Kansas is reading your website daily. What a way to connect with your visitors!

Another feature that is available in Clicky, but not in most web analytics services is the Outbound link tracking. This allows you to see which links are clicked by visitors to leave your website. Another feature I find oddly missing in Google Analytics but available with Clicky is the integration with Google Maps. Odd, but true.

Other features that might interest you are the FeedBurner feed stats integration and there is even a Developer’s API to extract your site statistics to be used in other applications.

The interface is also a lot cleaner and pleasant than Google Analytics, and this is certainly a major factor in analyzing the statistics without having to dread reading a report. Web analytics doesn’t have to be boring!

Note

Clicky is a free application, and some advanced features are only available upon subscription of USD2 a month. However all of the advanced features are free for 21 days. If anyone from Clicky is reading this, can I get a free 1 year’s membership?

Conclusion

These are my 2 recommendations for web analytics. Every blog owner should have at least one analytics software installed, so why don’t you just go ahead and try out these recommendations?

Also, let me know in your comments what you think of these applications, and also what applications you use that kick butt as well.

Written by : Klaw Last Modified : January 26th, 2008 Filed under : Blogging

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