Clicky Review: Comparing Clicky to Google Analytics
Gathering analytical data for your website or business is critical. You can gain so much insight on your web traffic and if you get a lot of traffic it can be an overwhelming amount of information. When it comes to analytics data, Google has been number one. Google Analytics is extremely in-depth with insight on what your visitors are doing when they come to your website. After using Google Analytics for many years I wanted to see if there was anything else out there that provided the same data but visually different. For the average user Google Analytics can seem quite advanced and having so much data can confuse you if it’s not presented in the right way. I came across Clicky Analytics and decided to review and compare Clicky VS Google Analytics.
What is Clicky Analytics?
After researching different analytical software I came across Clicky. Clicky is a web based analytics tool that let’s you see web traffic data in real-time in a clean and easy to understand interface. Clicky Analytics works similar to Google Analytics, you simply copy a small piece of javascript to your header or footer files for tracking. Once you add the tracking code Clicky will start gathering data instantly and it works in real-time whereas Google Analytics updates every 24 hours.
Clicky Best Features and Options:
Monitoring Social Media: One thing I love about Clicky is that you can monitor social activity for keywords on Twitter. This means that you can setup a search phrase and Clicky will search that term using Twitters built in search feature and display it on your Clicky dashboard. This is very useful to monitor what people are saying about your company and brand and it even gives you the ability to reply to tweets directly from within Clicky. If someone has something negative to say you’ll know instantly and you can even setup alerts in Clicky to email you when certain events are triggered, something Google Analytics can’t do.
Website Heatmaps: One of the most interesting features of Clicky are heatmaps. Heatmaps allow you to see exactly where users clicked on your website. This is a really interesting way to understand your visitors activity and interactions with your website. You can see if they tend to click on certain parts of the page and this allows you to adjust your websites design accordingly. As an example you might find people don’t click on your call-to-action as much as you’d like so you can possibly position it in a different area of your site to get more clicks. Heatmaps give you a clear picture of how your visitors interact and engage with different parts of your site. Another feature that Google Analytics simply does not offer.
Alerts and Notifications: Clicky has an alerting system so you can get an email notification when something specific happens on your website. Lets say you setup a ‘goal’ so when a sale is made on your website Clicky can send you an email that the ‘goal’ was reached. This is a nice feature to track goals and other information you might want to be alerted about without having to login to Clicky. You can also setup Clicky to send you email reports daily or weekly with a breakdown of your analytics in a simple email.
Campaign Tracking: One of my favorite features in Clicky Analytics is the ability to track various campaigns. If you use Google Adwords you want to be able to track and distinguish those visitors from your natural search result visitors. With Clicky you can create a campaign and monitor traffic from a specific ad campaign you’re running using UTM parameters. Google has a really useful URL Builder Tool that allows you to add UTM tracking so you can track where your visitors came from.
Spy on traffic: Another reason I like Clicky vs Google Analytics is their ‘spy’ feature. This option allows you to literally stream a visitors page views in real-time. It tells you what page your visitor is on and follow them as they browse your website. This is useful because if you know someone is on a specific page and you have Live Chat on your website you can engage in a chat and reference the product or service they are looking at in real-time. This gives you an upper hand on targeting your visitor and trying to convert the visitor to a customer.
Clicky Premium Features
Clicky Pricing and Plans:
Clicky offers 5 plans including a FREE plan. With their free plan you can monitor one website that gets 3,000 daily page views. It’s a totally free plan and is a great way to try out their analytics service. The best part is that when you Signup for Clicky you get all of the premium features to try for 21 days. You can see a list of all of the premium Clicky features in the image above. If after the 21 day trial you don’t want to upgrade your account will simply switch to the free plan and you can continue to use their platform.
I highly recommend a paid plan because the features you get with a paid account will give you tons of insight on your visitors and analytical data, it’s seriously a game changer.
Overall Clicky Review
How you use analytics depends on what you’re trying to gain out of it. For an e-commerce website analytics are critical. You need to know where your traffic came from, what your visitors looked at, why they clicked on certain parts of your website and so much more. With this information you can then change your sites design or even send out marketing emails based on the activity you see. Google Analytics is almost overkill for the average website owner and Clicky web analytics offers a simple and user friendly interface. I’ve got Clicky on 6 websites and visually it’s stunning. That being said it’s also a very powerful analytics platform and something I highly recommend everyone try.
If you’re looking for an alternative to Google Analytics give Clicky Web Analytics a try, click here.
