I recently added Clicky Web Analytics to my blog, trying out their 21 day trial of the premium service. I thought it would be interesting to see if anyone is actually looking at the blog out with my family and friends. Interestingly, it turns out that my family and friends aren’t actually looking at it, but there are some random people around the rest of the world that do read it, some of them quite consistently.

Which does make me think. Why aren’t my friends and family reading this, seeing as I was doing the blog for them, to keep up with me, purely because I refuse to use facebook…don’t ask. Still, there are people reading it so I guess that makes it worthwhile.

Well my free trial with Clicky Web Analytics ran out at the start of this week and I have paid for a premium account for a year. There a few really good features that I use on a daily (hourly) basis, I’ll go through my favorite features in turn.

· The visitors map

It’s just cool to be able to see where in the world people are reading your site from. Clicky use google maps to pinpoint where people are reading from. Each hit gets its own point and you can zoom in/out and use the map or satellite photo. The most consistent countries to hit my site are, Canada, USA, The Netherlands, Iceland, Norway, Australia, and some from Great Britain. Am really looking for people from Outer Mongolia (why not?), China, Antarctica and Greenland. So if you know of anyone that are in these countries, send them to my site! It would make my day!

· The Spy feature

Because sometimes it is just a really slow day… The spy feature allows you to see where your visitors have come from (where they have been linked to your site from) what they look at, and how long they spend on your site (assuming that they look at more than one page). It’s a bit voyeur like, but what the hell, it’s pretty cool and a bit 1984!

· OS, Web Client and Screen resolutions

You can also tell what Operating system, web client and screen resolution people are using. I think this is a really handy feature purely from a web design aspect as it gives you a clearer idea of what other people are using, especially for screen resolution. The most common screen resolution to visit this blog is 1024×768, closely followed by 1280×800. Internet Explorer is the most common web client with Firefox and Safari trailing behind. Personally I prefer Firefox now. I thought that I might have seen some people with Opera though?

Overall I have been pretty impressed by the functionality and usability of Clicky Web Analytics and I would recommend it as a statistics collector for anyone looking for such a program.

You may be asking why I am writing a blog on it, there are two reasons.

1. You may actually be search for a stats program for your site, and I would recommend clicky for smaller sites.
2. Clicky give you $5 for writing about their program…

Okay, so it’s only $5, but it is $5 towards something…like next years renewal on clicky!