Let me start this post off by saying that if you aren’t using Google Analytics on your website, you should be. It’s complete free and offers excellent information and great reporting capabilities that can be extremely powerful if you know how to use them. Having said that, I often get questions about other web analytics scripts and services. The major complaint is that webmasters are looking for the ability to get real-time information on their site’s traffic without having to always being a day behind.
There are various options that can be used to get real-time web analytics. Almost all of these options will fall into one of two categories: third-party hosted analytics and self-hosted analytics. The major appeal to self-hosted web analytics scripts is that they can often be free or purchased for a one-time fee. This is very appealing to many webmaster because affording monthly service fees is just not an option for many. The other primary benefit to self-hosted scripts is that those who are advanced in programming can often adjust the scripts to look and perform exactly how they want it to.
For the vast majority of webmasters, I don’t recommend going the self-hosted route for a couple of reason. Primarily, these scripts can be difficult to set up and even more difficult to maintain. Especially if you make any modifications to the scipt, you will be on your own if there are any problems. The other major downside that I see is that these scripts can be very server intensive, especially if you get a lot of traffic on your sites. It’s always nice to be using someone else’s resources for this sort of script, whenever possible.
I suspect that most readers on this blog will be much better suited by going with a third-party analytics service. Given this, I thought I’d focus this post on this option. I’ve used a few analytics services in the past and my favorite two have easily been Visistat and Clicky. I currently use Clicky for all of my websites because of the cost, but I’ll give some pro’s and con’s of each service below.
Visistat
Visistat does a great job of providing real-time stats in a very easy to view and understandable format. The service is capable of giving you just about any information you could want to know about your visitors including where they came from, how they navigate your website, how long they stay, and which link they leave through. One of my favorite features that Visistat offers is the ability to track the number of clicks on any link including links to pdf or other file downloads that can be difficult to count. One of the coolest features from Visistat is the Heat Touch tracking. You can actually view a “heat map” overlayed on your page to show you where people are clicking to give you an idea of which areas of the page are the hottest so that you can focus your best ads and content in the right areas.
So, why did I switch away from Visistat? The price. They actually increased their pricing a while back to $29.95 a month for up to 250,000 pageviews. They also offer some useful site uptime monitoring and PPC campaign tracking addons, but they will push your monthly bill even higher. If you can afford the prices, this is a really great service to have. They do offer a 33% discount if you pay for a year in full, so that helps to bring the cost down some if you can do that. If you are interested in Visistat, you can also get a free 7-day trial of their service, so give it a shot and see what you think.
Clicky
Clicky is a very powerful analytics service and is the service that I currently use for my sites. They actually have a great feature comparison on their homepage that compares the service to several other analytics services including Google. While I don’t think that Clicky’s reporting page is as well laid out and easy to use as Visistat, it is very customizable and can be made to fit your preferences. Plus, the dashboard for each website gives you the most important current information for that site. There are several pre-built widgets that you can put on your webpages to show the site’s key stats or you can use the available API to integrate the stats however you want to. If your site has an RSS feed, you can link your account to the feedburner feed to quickly see how many subscribers you currently have and can even link to your twitter account to monitor your number of followers. Using Clicky is extremely easy and only requires you to add a small piece of javascript to your pages.
Another of my favorite features is the Spy feature which lets you monitor your site in real-time and see who is browsing and what they are doing. Watching visitor behavior can really help you fine-tune your site to make it as useful as possible for your users. Clicky is also very affordable! Packages range from a free package that tracks 1 website and up to 3,500 pageviews per month up to a $19.99 per month superpro package that allows for 30 websites and 100,000 pageviews. There are also two packages in between, so you can easily find one that fits your needs.
I have become a huge fan of this service and highly recommend giving it a try with the free account. You can get more information on Clicky here.
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