How would you like to see where people are coming from and what they are doing on your site as it happens? I have been using a rather new web analytics service, Clicky, for the last two weeks and I’m hooked.

For the last two weeks I have abandoned Google Analytics. I don’t have to wait patiently for Google to update my stats, now I can see them live. Clicky gives much more instant gratification. The interface is we designed and I feel more intuitive.

First after you create your account, you need to add a site. They ask for your URL, name for the site, any mirrors if you use any, and also a FeedBurner user name if you use their service. Once you submit, a bit of Javascript is generated and you insert that into the footer template of your site. If you use WordPress, they have a plugin already to go.

Once you install the code, it may take up to ten minutes until your stats are tracked. Once you see stats, I encourage you to quickly click the “Spy” tab and watch the visitors come in. Aside from watching the page roll with each new visitor, you can click on the IP address of a row and get a summary of clicks from that particular visitor. You will see a Google map plotted with the visitor’s location, language, operating system, browser, resolution and number of actions the visitor took. Click on the actions and you will see all the pages the visitor clicked on.

There are also reports that graphically lay out the incoming and outgoing links as well as the top referrers. The search tab shows a clean aggregate of keywords that people used to get to your site from the search engines.

If you use the Google desktop, then you can add Clicky’s site widget. Get stats on your site without having to log into the site. It’s a nice, compact widget that gives you a wealth of information.

Clicky is great for monitoring your site amidst a surge in traffic from a social media site or if you want to see if your PPC campaign is working as expected. I used Clicky to watch my site as one of my pages got onto the home page of Sphinn. It was exciting to see the page roll continuously with visitors.

Clicky is free to use for 21 days with full features. If your site has less than 1,000 page views a day, then you can still remain free. The next level is called “Blogger” that is for $2.99/month or $19.99/year for 3 sites up to a total of 10,000 pages views. The top level is “Pro / small business”. That level costs $5.99/year or $49.99/year.

The prices are extremely sensible. I will be signing up for the Blogger package. It’s a small price to pay for the degree of information you receive. If you would like to sign up, I encourage you to use my link: Jason sent me.