I love tracking visitor stats on my websites and right now I have a bit of a thing for Clicky‘s really user-friendly interface. Google Analytics is running as well of course – it’s free and has incredible visitor tracking power but it’s also got a steep learning curve. Clicky’s interface isn’t so fussy and puts all the important stuff up front with plenty of levels to drill down into Goals, Conversions, Outlinks and so on. There’s monthly tariffs and a free option if you only have one site to track.
Because GA can be so daunting there’s plenty of third party apps trying to do a better job of presenting the key data – on my iPhone I turn to Quicklytics and on my Macs I use the GAget dashboard widget by Zoltan Hosszu, which graphs visits, new visitors and bounce rate in a lovely panel just a keystroke away.
I find these sorts of apps really useful to get a quick fix of stats so once I got Clicky all set up properly I started looked around for something similar, a little widget or menubar app to save me going to the Clicky website all the time (lovely as it is!).
Right now the only Mac app filling the niche for Clicky users is a handsome-looking little menubar widget called Analytics for Clicky ($3.99), and so I gave it a go.
How it works
Analytics for Clicky lives in your menu bar as a little pie-chart icon and digit representing current visitors on your site. Clicking it brings up a clean display of all the headline stats from Clicky’s site, organised via tabs: Dashboard is essentially ‘The Basics’, listing today’s visits, uniques, average actions and duration, and bounce rate; and the Content, Search and Links tabs list today’s top ten pages, in-bound search terms and referring domains.
Oh, and there’s Settings but that’s really just for your login and setting up the visitor alert, which will buzz you if the number of simultaneous visitors on your site passes a certain threshold.
Pros and cons
Like GAget, Analytics for Clicky is focussed on quickly scratching that stat-check itch and it serves that purpose admirably; it’s always just a click away, updates every few minutes, and looks great with a clean, organised interface. The range of stats packed into the tabs gives you a great overview of the day your site has had so far, and the fact it’s all live combined with the ease of access in the menubar makes using the app quite addictive, particularly at first.
Given all that, and also that it’s the only Clicky app for Macs out there right now, it feels a little churlish having niggles but there’s just a few things I’d like that I think would make it an essential purchase. In no particular order:
- it doesn’t list your Goals stat – you need to click through to Clicky’s website if you want to see it (using the handy button top right). This can be a key stat for webmasters so I’d love to see it added to the Dashboard panel in an update
- no graphs – graphs are a stat-junky’s friend and make it much easier to convey loads of data at a glance. The GAget widget is so awesome precisely because of its graphs so I wonder if Clicky’s Dashboard graph could be squeezed into Analytics either as a tab or by redesigning the top space, with the option to set the time-scale tucked into Settings?
- you can only track one site – I’ve got three sites I want to track so I just have to pick one and hit ‘Open Clicky’ if I want to see the others. GAget lets you place multiple widgets and set each up with a different GA profile; Analytics for Clicky has to fit everything into one ‘widget’ so it could really do with a site-switching option somewhere. The app title at top left feels redundant so perhaps it could be replaced with a clickable/switchable site-name?
- the stat order doesn’t match – the key stats are listed in one order on Clicky’s ‘The Basics’ and a different order in the Analytics Dashboard. This might seem really picky but humans like patterns so if you get used to one source, even a momentary search for the same stats on the other source will niggle at you. Well it niggles at me, anyway.
In conclusion
Analytics for Clicky is a neatly organised, good-looking, lightweight quick-fix solution for Clicky users on Macs, and the only one on the market at that.
Right now it doesn’t quite scratch my personal statistical itch as satisfyingly as I’d like – although full satisfaction via the full Clicky site is always just one more click away, regular use of that reduces a rather lovely little utility to a glorified browser shortcut. With the addition of goal-tracking, multiple sites and – maybe? – a visitor graph, it would easily be the most essential Clicky utility available for Macs.
You never know what delights future updates might bring but as it is it’s still a great tool with more than enough at-a-glance stats here for most people, and for the price I can happily recommend you give it a try.
