In my scan this morning for the Today’s 10, I noticed that Clicky is now offering a URL shortener of their own. The difference with the Clicky shortener (clicky.me) is that it’s directly tied into your Clicky analytics account. You must have a Clicky account to use the shortener.

They compare the Clicky shortener to the Twitter default shortener Bit.ly. Clicky notes that the biggest difference is that Bit.ly stops tracking the user when they arrive to your site while Clicky continues to track the user within their analytics tool. Maybe one day Twitter will allow users to select which shortener we want to use though that’s doubtful especially with their recent click tracking test.

Clicky now allows for segmentation of users and data by short url. They also boast that their offering only tracks humans not evil bots, search robots and other Internet crud.

In typical Clicky fashion they discuss the revenue model for Clicky.me. There isn’t one – well that’s not completely true. There won’t be any direct revenue from the offering but it should drive new users to the Clicky service and will strengthen the overall offering.

One of the comments on the announcement post wonders if spammers will use it since the shortener will work with the free version. If they moved it to paid-only plans, the new offering could help with conversions.

I’ve been using moourl for my shortening needs as it’s quick and has a cow on the page. The only real suggestion I have for all of the shorteners is to offer the preview option that TinyURL does. I never have a worry clicking a TinyURL as I know I will hit a page from which I can decide to proceed. Bit.ly apparently only offers this if you hack the URL (wtf) and I don’t know if Clicky’s offering allows for a preview but here’s hoping they add it. Safety will become more important with short URLs as more of the evil gets a hold of them. 

Note: We are an affiliate of Clicky however none of the links in this post carry an affiliate code.

Check out the feature list and comparison to other analytics tools. We use Clicky on CN and you can read all of our Clicky coverage along with our interview with founder Sean Hammons.

Clicky is offering Three (3) Free Professional Accounts for the life of the account! To enter for one of the accounts, send in an entry using our contact form. We will select three winners at the end of next week.

Note: I’ve turned off comments on this post to avoid any entry confusion – also, we are an affiliate of Clicky but I have turned off all affiliate links on this post.

If you have multiple sites using Clicky, you can setup the reports as templates as assign them to multiple sites. The email reports option is currently available only for Pro account holders but founder Sean Hammons says they may provide a basic email report to all customers in the near future.

Currently you can only select daily, weekly or monthly. I’d love to see an open selection where I can pick the times and frequencies that work best for me. I am still hooked on the Clicky Spy. To be able to watch visitors in real time is just like heaven.

Here’s a sample report – note that this report has only a couple of options checked.

Check out our interview with Clicky founder Sean Hammons and why we included Clicky in our top acquisition targets for 2008.

Editor’s note: We are setup as a Clicky affiliate however no links in this post carry the affiliate code.

Today Sean has posted about a variety of new visualization tools that Clicky now offers. Clicky has hired the team at Open Flash Chart to create even more customizations on their charting solution. Here is one basic example chart that’s now possible (bar charts were available previously):

The charts update on the fly and the "compare" feature is where the charting tool shows its strength. You can compare practically anything you want to see if there are correlations between the data. Sean has created an example displaying social media inbound traffic vs. bounce rate – perfect for checking how many Digg’rs come back a second time. The comparison possibilities are endless – I already have a list of charts to create.

In the title of this column, I included, "Clicky…Shows You How Freemium Is Done." Freemium means that the service offers a free version and then premium upgrades. I said this because these new charting features are free through this Sunday and then they move to the pro account (paid). Sean gives you the first crack rock free, gets you hooked so you keep coming back to him to buy more crack. I’ve written before that too many startups who employ the Freemium model give away too much for free and customers never have a reason to upgrade. But giving a taste of premium features every now and again makes perfect sense for trial.

In case you are interested, we are currently running the following analytical tools on CN:

• Clicky
• Google Analytics
• Mint
• ExtremeTracking
• A homegrown proprietary analytics tool

On the CN job board, Clicky is currently seeking a Web developer.

This is a "community" project — that means Clicky is asking its users to do the translation. You select a language and are presented with a term to translate. After the translations are in the system, you can vote on which translation is best and then a winner for each needed translation will be selected. What I’d like to see added is a percentage of total completion for each language.

Are you thinking about translation and localization as you develop your Web applications? While not applicable in every case, localization can bring new visitors and potential incremental revenue. If you aren’t thinking of localization, please share your reasons why.

While checking my Clicky analytics account today, founder Sean Hammons has a post about his experiences with Rubicon Project to-date. He obviously got into the beta. Here are some snippits from his post:

That optimization is a fairy tale unfortunately, and doesn’t do jack diddly. Plus we’ve had two major problems with the service, including them not paying us for our first month even though we had earned WAY above the minimum threshold, and both times their customer service sucked big time. And the ads are extremely irritating anyways, and that’s not at all what we want. 

This company has a raised $18 million in funding which is just unbelievable. There’s no way they’re using any more bandwidth or resources than Clicky is (they’re still in private beta), and we started on essentially zero dollars from our own pockets and have taken zero funding and have zero debt.

Clearly the issue with any of these maximizers is garbage in-garbage out. Have you used Rubicon Project or one of the other ad maximization services (e.g. YieldBuild/PubMatic)? If so, leave your thoughts in the comments.

AOL

Buyer: Yahoo

Why: Yahoo needs to expand its base of distribution for the Yahoo ad platform. What better way than to acquire the population segment who uses AOL and loves it? AOL users click ads which means a potential cash win for Yahoo sa they could integrate contextually-relevant advertising into AOL, something AOL doesn’t do currently. It would also give them access into Hulu thru the AOL Video portal. It might even perk up the employee morale which I read has been quite low this past year.

Zoho

Buyer: IBM

Why: A couple times each week I read about IBM wanting to own the services market. Acquiring Zoho would give IBM a foothold into Web 2.0 and since Zoho targets the small business, would give IBM a chance to sell the small business on even more IBM-based services. It could even help IBM to slowly become a household name again in the Web space, something that they have no real presence in today.

Clicky

Buyer: Webtrends

Why: Webtrends is so completely out of the Web game, it’s sad. I remember beta testing the first version of Webtrends in the mid-90s and watched the company never move forward. Clicky is hot, both from the application-side and the buzz-side, and could be a good fit for Webtrends. Most small businesses need simple Web analytics and while Clicky is more robust than just simple, it would give a slow entry into the current Web market for Webtrends. That is of course if they actually want to move forward, something I’ve wondered for eight years now.

CrazyEgg/ClickTale

Buyer: Omniture

Why: To help Omniture move further into the Web testing market and provide a rounded suite of tools for their clients. Last year I said that CrazyEgg should be acquired by a large creative agency but I’ve changed my mind and am going with Omniture. CrazyEgg and ClickTale provide the testing and Omniture provides the analytics – I could see some nice A/B type testing with these acquisitions.

Pageflakes/Netvibes

Buyer: Yahoo

Why: Both Pageflakes and Netvibes have good footings into the early adopter, "cool techie" segments. This is a segment which Yahoo lacks on but could be a very influential segment for buzz. Completed correctly, Yahoo could (once again) start to get their search and other products in front of the early adopter, blogger crowd which can be an excellent way for Yahoo to get messages out and have forced use of their technology.

Note: Zoho is a current sponsor of CN.

We use Clicky on CN and you can read my review from earlier this year along with our interview with founder Sean Hammons. I believe Clicky is one of the most useful Web 2.0 apps around and with my 10+years of analytics experience can say one of the strongest on features, especially for the price. Check out the feature list and comparison to other analytics tools.

Just for readers of CenterNetworks, Clicky is offering Two (2) Free Professional Accounts for the life of the account! To enter for one of the accounts, send in an entry using our contact form. We will select two winners at the end of next week!

(I’ve turned off comments on this post to avoid any entry confusion)

With that said, I’ve been working hard to line up a variety of exclusive Holiday Gifts for you. Over the next ten business days, there will be one gift each day. From service discounts, to premium beta access to free conference passes, we’ve got something you will like!

In the graphic below, you will note one slot with ??? in it. That’s because I have left one slot open. I’d like your feedback on who should fill that slot and I will go after them! Leave your ideas in the comments. And if you have a service to offer as a treat, contact us. It can’t be a free service is the only rule.

Here’s who’s participating — pretty impressive lineup!:

• OurStage – 12 free song downloads – get holiday gift
• Compete – free credits towards the search analytics tool – get holiday gift
• Clicky – two free pro accounts – get holiday gift
• Freshbooks – 30% off new subscriptions – get holiday gift
• TapeFailure – 40% off new subscriptions – get holiday gift
• Drop.io – free premium upgrade codes – get holiday gift
• CrazyEgg – Some pro accounts – get holiday gift
• Future of Web Apps in Miami – 5 free conference passes – get holiday gift
• CenterNetworks – 50% off job board posts – get holiday gift

Update: Please DO NOT signup for TapeFailure – the site will be closing at the end of this month :(

You won’t know which Holiday Gift will come which day nor what time – so be on the lookout! Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to All!

Allen: Can you provide a brief background about yourself?

Sean: I’ve had a high interest in computers since I was young (currently 29), and have taught myself most of what I know. I don’t have any formal training or a degree in my field. I graduated from Oregon State with a Bachelor’s in Psychology of all topics. I started fooling around with making web pages in 1999, and have been employed in this field for about three and a half years now.

Allen: What is Clicky and where did the idea come from?

Sean: Clicky is designed for small to medium sized web sites, with a strong focus on usability and data presentation. It started as an internal project at my last job. We wanted a tool that showed us what individual users were doing on our web site in a clean and easy fashion, and there was absolutely nothing that was both cheap and good. We liked the results a lot, and decided to make it into a public product. That was about 9 months ago.

Allen: How does the service work?

Sean: People sign up and are given two lines of HTML to add to their web site. One line of javascript sends us lots of juicy details about everything happening on your web site. The second line is a backup image based tracking system, so we can still track users who have javascript disabled, although we can’t get quite as much data out of these people. Then people can view their data on our site, which is updated in near real time.

Allen: What makes Clicky special?

Sean: Our focus on usability and data presentation is key. Most of the data available from our service is also available from many other services. But it’s either confusing or poorly done. Our interface is very clean and easy to navigate, and the data is presented in a way that makes sense. We also have some really cool features like Spy (a live view of people using your web site), an API, custom data tracking, and outbound link tracking (which I’ve found extremely useful).

Allen: What’s the team like at Clicky?

Sean: Well, there’s just two of us, and we live in different cities, and we work out of our homes. So we don’t see each other too often, but we do talk by email or phone just about every day. I am the programmer and my partner handles business stuff and other non-techie details.

Allen: Who is using Clicky? Bloggers, corporate sites, etc?

Sean: All types of sites. Not sure if any major corps are using it, but there are plenty of business sites and other non-blog sites using Clicky. About half our sites are blogs though, which is one of our our target markets.

Allen: Who are your competitors?

Sean: There’s about a billion analyzers out there, but the only ones I consider as serious competition are Google Analytics (it’s free and everyone loves Google), and Mint (the only analyzer that’s ever made me say "wow, that’s cool").

Allen: Sell me on using Clicky instead of Google Analytics.

Sean: I’m perfectly fine with people preferring GA over Clicky, as Clicky isn’t for everyone. It really depends on your web site, but the people who like it swear by it. If you have a relatively high traffic site, and are only interested in trends, then GA is a great product, no doubt. We don’t offer nearly as much trend data or cross-segmentation of data as they do, but we offer a great interface, a lot of detail on individual users, and have a ton of features that GA does not offer – real time data, an API, stats via RSS, Spy, custom data tracking, tag clouds, outbound link tracking, download tracking, non-javascript support, feedburner RSS statistic integration … the list goes on. So, it depends on what you’re looking for.

Allen: Do you have a monetization plan? If so, can you share some details? Are you funded?

Sean: Yes, we make money off premium subscriptions, ads, and licensing. We’re completely self funded at this point.

Allen: Can you share some details about your marketing plan?

Sean: We have done exactly zero marketing. We have spread purely by word of mouth.

Allen: What’s coming in the next 3-6 months for Clicky?

Sean: We just released a fully customizable Dashboard that’s a lot of fun to use and offers some great trend data. The technology behind it will be spreading to the rest of the site within a few weeks. We also want to offer a number of widgets for our users to put on their web sites. We have a contest going on right now with over $600 of prizes going out to the people who can create the coolest widgets using our API, so we’re hoping this will be a good start for that. Beyond that, I’m always making improvement to the backend code and database, and tweaking the interface here and there. We also have a top secret feature that will be coming in a month or so, that I can’t talk about right now. We’re really excited about it though.

Allen: What’s been your biggest lesson learned since you started Clicky?

Sean: We’ve had a lot of people approach us about potential investments, or partnerships, or helping us out in some regard. Unfortunately, these people tend to be greedy, flaky, or both. So, be wary. If you are interested in help or money, consider initiating the relationship yourself.

Allen: Now that the pageview has been declared dead, where do you see analytics moving over the next year?

Sean: Not sure. Trend analysis is a pretty hot topic right now, and we plan to offer a lot more of it when our infrastructure can handle analyzing all of that data in fun and interesting ways. This is where GA really shines. Unfortunately, we don’t have billions of dollars in the bank like Google does, so we don’t have ten thousand servers running this thing.

Allen: How important is analytics to a Web site or blog?

Sean: I would say that if you’re not using analytics on your site, you’re insane. It’s extremely important and useful to know how people are using your site, and how they’re finding it.

Allen: What advice do you have for those thinking about starting a web application?

Sean: We entered a very saturated market, which includes a competitor (Google) that most people run home to mommy about. But – if your idea is good, or your product has unique features that other similar ones don’t, you can succeed! We are making enough money for both of us to live off of, and then some. If you want to make money, have a monetization plan other than Adsense. Adsense is crap unless your site is content oriented, and web 2.0 "service" sites do not have the content to produce good ads. Consider running your own ad service (like we do), or use something like text-link-ads.com. "Freemium" service is also a good way to go (free service with limitations, pay service for full feature set). It’s what we do, and it works well.

Allen: Which RSS feeds are you reading these days?

Sean: I prefer actually visiting web sites for content. Using aggregators for content is a sweet idea, but just too much information for me to digest. Daily, I read Slashdot, Engadget, JoyStiq, del.icio.us/popular, and TechCrunch. I also read Avinash Kaushik’s blog (it’s all about analytics). However, I do use RSS for one thing, and that’s to keep myself up to date on our competitors without too much effort by subscribing to their blog feeds ;)

Clicky

Clicky is currently my favorite analytics application. The interface is excellent, has a Web 2.0 feel to it without going overboard. The best features are the real-time spy and the IP user lookup. The user maps and location information is very detailed giving you insights into where your users are, how they access your site, and what they do on your site.

General comments:

• The basic account is limited to 1,000 pageviews per day. Most users will want the $2.99 plan.
• There is an affiliate program which earns credits towards free premium memberships.
• Support is great and the site is very user-friendly.
• Clicky is also running an API contest currently. So far I know of one entry at ideAjax which basically is a sweet world map.

eXTReMe Tracking

eXTReMe Tracking has the absolute best user lookup tools that I have found to-date. If you want to be able to look at individual users and their patterns, eXTReMe Tracking does this very well. The rest of the app is strong, but not the strongest of the tools listed.

General comments:

• The free account is limited and requires you to place a graphic on your site. The pro account is $4.50 a month.
• The "on the map" feature is the best user mapping tool I have tried. In fact, Dateline NBC used it on a sting operation last year.
• The site does have a short learning curve and the interface layout could be improved.

Google Analytics

I have used Google Analytics since they first launched and the new version is very powerful. I don’t love GA but keep it running because it is generally the best comparison from site-to-site.

General comments:

• Some users report that the Goals options don’t always track correctly
• I am not crazy about Google controlling every aspect of my site including the site traffic.
• Overall, this is the most popular analytics app for three reasons: Google’s trust level, their ability to market it thru the AdWords program and that the app is free.

Mint

I like Mint. It is the fastest of the analytics applications listed and it runs on your local server. I used to believe it was better to keep everything on your local server with regards to analytics apps, but today there ASP model apps have really improved their ability to track and not lose data.

General comments:

• There is no free plan, $30 gets you a license for the current x.y version. Once x is upgraded, the charge is $15.
• There is an excellent support community who can help with support and extending the app.
• Mint offers "Peppers" which are basically add-ons to extend the functionality of the app. Most are built by the Mint community.

Quantcast

Quantcast is the odd man out in this grouping. Quantcast doesn’t provide as much detail as the above and is really used as a ranking and evaluation tool. Sites that use their plugin are called "Quantified Publishers" on the site. Frankly I wish more sites would use this because then it could create more fair comparisons. Quantcast is what Alexa wishes it would be.

Final summary

I left Complete off the list because I am currently working with them to attempt to rectify the reporting issues on CN. Once they have corrected the issues, I will post my thoughts on Complete. I have not included the "professional" level packages such as Webtrends, Omniture and WebSideStory. Lastly, many web hosting packages provide basic metrics applications. I didn’t include these because I find that they are generally worthless and out-of-date.

What tools are you using? Is it one (or more) of the above? Are there others I should be reviewing/testing?

ExtremeTracking

Product Link | Product Demo
Price: $54/yr or $6.25/month full version, free version also available – must show stats icon

Pros:

• Excellent IP tools – find out exactly where your visitors are coming from down to the individual company or location
• You can drill down to a specific page and get all of the stats just for that individual page
• Tracks connection speed, OS, browser, java/javascript, screen colors and resolutions
• CSV downloads
• Ability to exclude IPs from reporting (good for excluding yourself, team, etc.)

Cons:

• Poor history – only offers full access for last 300 visitors, then is grouped by day, week, etc.
• Not the prettiest thing in the world
• Free version allows anyone to view your stats

Screenshots – click to enlarge

Mint

Product Link | Product Demo
Price: $30 one-time

Pros:

• Very Web 2.0, excellent design and usability
• Lots of “Pepper” – plugins
• a forum for help and the creator actually helps with installation and usage questions
• RSS Feeds

Cons:

• History is limited beyond 24 hours back
• No ability to customize time period for reports
• No export option outside of RSS
• Only can exclude one IP address

Screenshots – click to enlarge

Google Analytics

Product Link | Product Tour
Price: Free

Pros:

• Tied in with Google AdWords and Google Checkout
• Free and no icon required
• Provides good basic stats
• Good export options – text, csv, xml

Cons:

• Not the most indepth tool
• Works the best when you use AdWords and/or Checkout
• Can’t exclude IPs

Screenshots – click to enlarge

HitBox

Product Link | Product Demo
Price: $323/yr, $34.95/month

Pros:

• Full featured web analytics tool
• Ability to receive reports via e-mail
• Provides good basic stats
• Good export options – text, csv, xml

Cons:

• Higher cost
• Reports limited to 100 web pages
• Reports are huge and take some time to generate

Screenshots – click to enlarge

SiteMeter

Product Link | Product Demo
Price: Free, must display stats icon

Pros:

• Real-time stats
• Ability to receive reports via e-mail
• Provides good basic stats
• Pretty cool traffic predictor

Cons:

• Must display a SiteMeter icon on your site
• Heavy advertising on report display
• Not the prettiest design

Screenshots – click to enlarge

Summary

I use Mint, Google Analytics and ExtremeTracking on CenterNetworks. I think together they provide the most comprehensive coverage for my needs. Each tool has its own pros and cons so you can decide what you need/want for your web site/blog. I would suggest at a minimum you use Google Analytics because it is free. And get it working today. Each day you wait, is another day of no ability to speak to your traffic. Even if you never look at a report, do it anyway. When you get your funding, sell the site, or get your first advertiser, you can thank me :).