Clicky web-stats. Perfect!

As I've posted before, I've been getting back into web-development recently, working on my new skills in CSS & (x)html mark-up. One of the things i used to enjoy looking at when I developed websites years ago was the web-stats, hits, stuff like that.

In my recent development however, I've not been able to find a good free web-stat service. Somewhere i can log onto and view the hits, the search terms, the referrers for my sites.

That was until this week when i happened across 'Clicky', the perfect solution.

I Found 'Clicky' to be a decent web-stat app. It shows me what i want to know in a clear & precise way.

Setting up was easy as pie. You register on the website, and it then asks you to set up your website. You enter the URL, and then any other re-directs you have going, other URL's and such forth. Once you've entered this data, and submitted it to Clicky, it gives you the script that you must enter on your website. And it's not much of a script either. It's only 2 lines of javascript, and seems to work a whole host of magic!

I've got Clicky measuring stats for 2 of my websites at the moment, and it's giving me an average hit count (based over a the previous few days), current unique hits for the day, and it also gives you the amount of click's each user has done!

It goes into further detail too! It'll even tell you what browser the user is using, and the operating system they are running. For example, for ClubTrinity.co.uk, the last 20 people to visit were running Windows, 18 of which were running Internet Explorer, and 2 (only 2?!) were running Firefox.

This can be pretty handy when producing websites, but that's another story!

'Clicky' will also tell you what pages have been visited and by whom. Every user has their IP address, and this is how Clicky can tell which pages have been visited by which user. This enables you to see what users are looking for, and obviously allows you to tailor your site to suit. It even tells you how long each user was on the website for!

On the flip side though, as much as i like 'Clicky' (and I've only been using it 3 days), it is missing a couple of features which I'd like to see, screen resolution for example! I'd like to see how many users are running at 800x600 compared to how many are running 1600x1200.

The other problem I found (and i have spoken to the guy's at Clicky about it) is the fact that when you have multiple sites in the Clicky database, it strips all sub-directories from the name.

Now the 2 websites i have on their currently are hosted on the same server, but under different sub directories. So now when i log-in and use the drop down box to choose which site I'd like to see stats for, all i see is the domain name. I'd like to be able to specify and call each site by a certain name. But I've been assured that they are working on this, so it's all good!

I'd definitely recommend Clicky for an on-line, quick & easy web statistics tool. It's helped me out massively, and it will help me tweak my sites further for the better! If you run a website, and your looking for a stat tool, i think this is the one!

Check it out, 'Clicky'