Google Analytics Versus Clicky Analytics

Google Analytics is a great tool for businesses of all sizes to use when analyzing and tracking their data. With the ability to track views, clicks, page views and unique page views, this tool easily gives the essential information needed to better track your metrics to help make business decisions. Additionally, detailed reports can be generated that illustrate exactly where those views and clicks for example are generated from. Information such as gender, age, interests and demographic locations are just a few examples of the information that can be easily measured with Google Analytics. Furthermore, with options to set personalized filters to track data that is specifically important to your target audience, it is hard to argue that Google Analytics isn’t a vital resource to use. To add the cherry on top, this program is free. (Insert heart-eyes emoji here)

According to W3Techs, Google Analytics is being used by 52.9 percent of all websites on the Internet. (McGee, 2015) With all the amazing features that Google Analytics has to offer, one may be asking yourself, “Why wouldn’t a company use Google Analytics?” Well, believe it or not, there are TONS of other analytic tools that do the same things as Google Analytics with different (and quite possibly more) features.

Clicky Analytics, Heap, Open Web Analytics, Piwik, Stat Counter, W3 Counter, and Chartbeat are just some of the many alternatives that have similar features to Google Analytics and have been proven to be effective in businesses around the world. (Melaugh, 2017) For this blog post in particular, I will focus on my research gathered from Clicky Analytics and discuss the similarities and differences it has compared to Google Analytics.

Clicky Background

Clicky Analytics is a web tracking service provided by Roxr Software that allows it’s users to track their website’s visitors and generate reports from the information derived from its traffic. (Marcu, 2013) Clicky is available for free for one site with less than 3,000 daily page views. Additionally, Clicky offers “pro plans” which allow it’s users to access more advanced features for a small fee. (Hall, n.d.)

Similarities

The instant connection to be made between Clicky Analytics and Google Analytics is their target audience. Both of these tools mainly target small to medium sized businesses who are interested in tracking their website traffic and conversion rates. Additionally, both of these tools provide a variety of plugins that can be integrated with your analytics. WordPress, specifically, is one plugin they both have in common. 

Both Google Analytics and Clicky Analytics allow their users to track the amount of clicks, visits and time spent per session on their website. Additionally, they both generate conversions and allow users to run conversion reports. Conversion reports focus on conversions that occur with the completion of an activity that a particular business is set out to accomplish. (Reed College of Media, 2018) Similarly, they both offer real time goals to help users better understand their transaction rates. This gives users the ability to analyze each visit more closely and figure out exactly how to increase conversion rates.

Google Analytics and Clicky Analytics both give users the ability to use filters. Filters are applied to the information that is coming to your analytic account, to manipulate the final data in order to provide accurate reports. However, there is a slight difference within this aspect. With Google Analytics, you can only use predefined filters to either include or exclude filtering logic. (Reed College of Media, 2018) In Clicky Analytics, you have the choice to use those same pre-defined filters, with the addition of site-specific and global filters. Filters based on visitor’s page URL, referrer, location and organization are four additional options that Clicky Analytics offers. (Clicky Analytics, 2018)

Both of these analytic platforms use real-time monitoring to allow users to see exactly how many people are viewing their website at that particular moment as well as over a certain period of time. This leads us into the next similarity: visualization of the captured data.  

Both Google Analytics and Clicky Analytics offer flow visualization mapping. This makes it extremely easy on users to visualize the information being generated from their websites’ traffic.  Additionally, both of these tools have dashboards that are fairly easy to understand and digest the information. Dashboards are visualization tools that display the current status of Metrics and company’s key performance indicators.  (Rouse, n.d.) Dashboards consolidate and arrange metrics in a way that makes it easily understandable for businesses to analyze data.

Differences

Perhaps the first difference that users may notice when researching which website analytics plan to choose is the price. Google Analytics caters to their target audience by offering a completely free life-time package. As previously mentioned, Clicky Analytics also offers a free version of their tool, as well as a variety of different packages with special features that range from $9.99 per month to $19.99 per month.

Besides the cost, the other big difference between Google Analytics and Clicky Analytics is the amount of information that can actually be tracked. Google Analytics has such a wide variety of metrics to pick and choose from, whereas Clicky Analytics can only really track the amount of clicks, visits and time per session on each page.  

Additionally, Google Analytics gives its users the ability to create their own custom reports with that data rather than using the standard reporting templates already provided.  Furthermore, the reports you have the ability to pull on Clicky Analytics are very limited. I find it very useful to know how users are viewing my website. Unlike Google Analytics, Clicky Analytics does not have the capability to track traffic from mobile devices.  Also, Google Analytics allows you to pull demographic reports which illustrate age, gender, location and behavior of users. This is a feature that Clicky Analytics does not offer with it’s free package that is comparable to Google Analytics’.

One thing that I found throughout my research which I thought was interesting is Clicky Analytics’ use of heatmaps. Heatmaps can be useful in terms of trying to visualize exactly where visitors are clicking on pages. Additionally, Clicky Analytics enables users to segment their heatmaps by goals, split tests, visitor sessions and much more. (Clicky Analytics, 2018)

Conclusion

To wrap up the analysis of comparing and co ntrasting these two analytic platforms, I’d say the two are fairly similar, however, Google Analytics appears to remain the superior platform. Besides the fact that it’s completely free to businesses, it offers so much more in terms of the metrics you can track and how to uniquely tailor it depending on the firm and business goals. I would, however, be open to using both platforms in order to have more filtering options and the appeal of utilizing the heatmapping in Clicky Analytics.

Works Cited

Clicky Analytics. (2018). Clicky vs Google Analytics. Retrieved from https://clicky.com/compare/google

Hall, S. (No Date). Analytics Update: Do You Need a Second Analytics Package? Retrieved from https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/clicky-web-analytics/

Marcu, A. (2013, June 22). Clicky Analytics Review. Retrieved from https://deconf.com/clicky-web-analytics-review/  

McGee, M. (2015, November 12). As Google Analytics Turns 10, We Ask: How Many Websites Use It? Retrieved from https://marketingland.com/as-google-analytics-turns-10-we-ask-how-many-websites-use-it-151892

Melaugh, S. (2017, May 6). The 11 Best Alternatives to Google Analytics. Retrieved from https://activegrowth.com/web-stats-alternatives-to-google-analytics/ 

Reed College of Media. (2018). IMC 642, Lesson 4. Retrieved February 1, 2018 from 

https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_97081_1&content_id=_4434997_1&framesetWrapped=true

Rouse, M. (No Date).  Business Intelligence Dashboard. Retrieved from http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/definition/business-intelligence-dashboard