The importance of a website tracker for business websites

[Fortuner]

This post is for those of you that have websites. I thought that I would just share this useful information.

I use a wonderful free website tracker called Get Clicky (I know corny name) but it works like a bomb. http://getclicky.com What I love about this lovely little gadget is its FREE and it tracks all visits to your website. It shows you how many visitors you have had visit your site, from what region and country a visitor came from, what they did on your website, and for how long they stayed on your site. These kinds of statistics are really important because if you see that visitors are not staying on your site for more than 10 seconds then you know that you have a problem, visitors are not interested in your site and you may need to make some changes. You can also see from these statistics what visitors are interested in and what they are not interested in, and it tells you where your traffic is coming from, so if you are getting a lot of traffic from one blog site or article directory and not another then you know where to focus your time and effort more.

[Dave A]

The first thought that came to mind - why not just use Google Analytics? Their answer -

Services like Google Analytics do everything except take out the trash, but you probably don't know what any of the data means. With Clicky, everything just makes sense.

I'm not sure I agree with that though. To me GA is great! Not confusing at all.

[Fortuner]

I have to disagree with you Dave I had both Google Analytics and clicky on my site and clicky I found was more reliable on stats it tells you everything in such a simplified manner whereas Google Analytics was not giving the correct stats at all it would say I had 1 visitor for the whole day when clicky shows me 40 visitors and the amount of time each visitor was on my site and what they downloaded and where on my site each visitor went. Also after linking my Adsense to Analytics my Adsense earnings dropped from R10 per day to R0.00 per day.... and if you go to the Google help forums every complaint is about the same thing. In my opinion Google Analytic is unreliable and to unlink them from your adsense is impossible.

[derekjay]

I personally use Google Analytics for my sites and am quite happy with it. I haven't used Clicky, so I can't comment on that, but chances are that the two programs qualify different things as visits. For example, clicky quite see a crawler as a visitor, or something like that.

What you also might find is that the analytics code wasn't inserted on every page, and thus these were missed.

Either way - I agree with Fortuner - whichever application you use, tracking your website is essential and also very informative.