I’m a sucker for analytics of blog traffic - especially for my own blogs and up until my recent run in with hosting problems I had been using FireStats which is a stats plugin for WordPress users. I still like FireStats a lot but since my hosting problems I have been looking at off-site solutions for various things to do with the blog because I really don’t want to relive having to deal with that problem again.

The most logical plugin to try using an outside source to handle in my opinion was the stats one. Now I know everyone is going to say go Google man - to which I reply No! This isn’t to say that I haven’t tried the Google service before but I don’t like it. I can’t give any real reasons as to why … I just don’t like it.

Previously I had written about the stats service provided by Performancing.com thinking that it looked pretty good. Then I was informed by Doug Karr; a fellow blogger, that it looked suspiciously like a repackaged version of the Clicky Analytics service - which in fact it did.

 Just before the hosting problems I decided to sign up with Clicky to see how well it worked and so after my hosting problem was solved I figured why not use them full time. After all they provided all the metrics I wanted and with a very nice and easy to navigate interface; which is a nice plus. Not to mention the Spy option which displays whose visiting in real time. I imagine this is some fancy use of AJAX but it is only available in the Pro account and the 21 day trial period.

As far as cost Clicky has three different prices depending on your needs:

• Basic - Free, up to 3 sites, up to 1,000 average daily page views per site. Limited feature set.
• Blogger - $2.99/month or $19.99/year. Up to 3 sites and 10,000 average daily page views total (between all sites). Includes extra features like RSS feeds, Spy, outbound link tracking, download tracking, IP tagging, IP filtering, and more.
• Pro / Small business - $5.99/month or $49.99/year. Up to 10 sites and 50,000 average daily page views total. Includes all features from ‘Blogger’ plan, plus full custom data tracking (usernames, etc), SSL support, full API access, and data export.

At this point I am still on the free trial period but I think once it it up I’ll definitely be checking my PayPal account to see if I can afford the Blogger level account. Sure I could go with free services but I kinda like being able to say thanks for hard work well done with a few bucks.

Conversation Tags: Clicky, analytics, metrics, blogs