The last time I recommended a tool without reservation it was HitTail and now I am recommending another! Ideal for small to medium traffic websites and bloggers it’s an online analytics service with some useful features not found in Google Analytics.
The tool is called Clicky and is programmed by Sean Hammons who is the technical half of Roxr Software Ltd a two person company based in Portland, Oregon. Sean has a degree in psychology and it shows. Not least because the report pages are beautifully minimalist and highly addictive, as you will discover when you initially use the service.
After you have registered all you have to do is include two lines of code in the footer of every page on your site and from then on information about every click by every visitor is sent back to Clicky and logged to your account. This information includes the visitor’s IP address, geographic location, browser type, operating system, URL and page title, the date and time and where they came from. If they came from a search engine the search query is also logged.
When you log into your account there are a range of reports you can view, for example here is a partial screen shot showing some of this site’s visitors on May 21st 2007.

It shows the time of the visit, IP address, country of origin, operating system, browser, number of actions, duration of visit and where they came from. You can click on the links to obtain more information. For example clicking on one of the IP addresses will bring up a view showing visitor details like this.

The integration of Google maps is a nice touch and the table of actions below it can prove very useful, as also can the ‘Content’ view.

Here we can see the stats for individual pages with the option of selecting entry or exit pages only.
To keep this post a reasonable length I will not list all the functionality of Clicky but the ‘Spy’ view needs to be mentioned. It is a live view of visitors interacting with the site and comes with a health warning because it is extremely addictive! It even has an optional RSS feed so you can integrate it into your favorite feed reader.
Clicky does not have all the advanced features of Google Analytics (or other analytics software) but its presentation and real time functionality make it a more suitable choice in most cases for small to medium traffic websites and bloggers.
Clicky is free for up to 3 sites with less than 1,000 average daily page views per site but comes with a limited feature set as it is free. For $2.99/month or $19.99/year you can have up to 3 sites and 10,000 average daily page views total (between all sites) and this includes the additional features like RSS feeds, Spy, outbound link tracking, download tracking, and more. There is also a Pro/Small business version for $5.99/month or $49.99/year where you can have up to 10 sites and 50,000 average daily page views total with all the additional features (including those in development) plus SSL support.
Sean tells me that additional features in the pipeline include data export, viewing aggregate data from more than a day and analyzing traffic for individual pages (e.g. where people came from, where they went to, what searches lead to this page, etc.).
Congratulations to Roxr Software on a great tool and a great implementation.