For those of you looking for an easy way to track your website visitors, I highly recommend Clicky. Clicky is an alternative analytics software, which tracks exactly where your users came from, the exact keywords they used to find your website, the pages they visited within your website, and the page they exited from.

The Juicy Clicky

Clicky offers an API system for more advance users, but can be used quite simply by adding a bit of code to the bottom of your web pages. The beauty of Clicky is the individual visitor tracking system, that allows me to determine where, when and how the visitor reached any of my websites. Clicky offers a very simple interface where I can sort my users by date, page etc. but the one predominant reason I utilize Clicky for my websites, is to get detailed information on any and all conversions, immediately. To be much clearer, the moment I receive a conversion, I simply click a link and immediately get the precise pathing of the user that lead to the conversion.

Clicky Image #1: Web Logs on Steroids

The image above shows one of the conversions we received just this morning. The visitor details give me precise information about the individual who has completed a conversion, below this, is the information on the users actions while on the website, along with the search engine or referring page, and the keywords utilized to find our website, this is the information that I want and need to help me determine the value of those keywords if I wish to purchase them via one of our PPC campaigns.

Actions, help me determine how the user got to the conversion page. In this case, the user traveled through 4 pages within the website prior to converting, by clicking the Action link, I can see these individual pages. I can get further information on the individual keyword or phrases as well as look at the referring page quickly and easily.

Why Tracking User Information is Important to Marketing Efforts

We recently launched three additional landing pages to a clients website. At the end of the day or week, I determine whether the landing page was a success or whether it required some changes. What funnels appear predominantly with the landing page will help me decide on changes needed to avoid any unnecessary click-aways.

Why the user left and where they went, are all fundamental to determining what changes need to be made.  Because you get this information much quicker than alternative sources, you can make the changes necessary to improve performance immediately, verses waiting continuously and losing money.

Better Control over User Funnels Equate to Higher Conversions

It’s not uncommon for clients to get trapped into the “more visitors equal more conversions” way of thinking. But what if you could show them that it’s just as important to funnel current visitors onto your landing page, to increase conversions? Clicky is perhaps the most powerful tool to utilize in your quest to funnel users onto landing pages.

Funneling users is often overlooked by many, with most webmasters concerned about higher visitor numbers. It’s not uncommon for websites to see a notable number of visitors to their front page verses other pages within the website, but where the user goes from there, is much more important than the number of visits.

We’ve utilized countless tests on Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer to try and perform quick visitor funnel changes, but due to the 24 hour wait on results, we decided to utilize Clicky. Within minutes we can easily determine what users are doing and why, this gives us a better understanding of how to place marketing material on our leading web pages so the user can quickly find what they need faster. Giving the users what they want is the ultimate goal of any website - take this advice straight from Google.

With the power of tracking user visits with Clicky, we dropped our bounce rate by 30% as reported by Google Analytics. We saw a significant increase in sales and leads at the beginning of the 2008 quarter and currently out sell any of our clients competitors by a large margin - all during a down economy.

How to Use Clicky to Track Your Website Visitors

First, sign up for an account at Clicky and add the tracking code to your website. Once done, edit your conversion alerts to include a link to the following URL. Conversion alerts, meaning the final sale alert you are sent after a conversion is made.  Make sure you do this just for your Conversion Alert, and not the response sent to the customer:

http://www.getclicky.com/stats/visitors?site_id=[Your_Clicky_SITE_ID_Number]&ip_address=[IP_ADDRESS_OF_THE_USER&referer=&search=&order=newest&x=Apply+Filters+’

Replace the following:

Your_Clicky_SITE_ID_Number:  The Unique Site ID Number assigned by Clicky
IP Address of the User: With PHP you can easily use the global variable $_SERVER[”REMOTE_ADDR”]

That’s it! Wait for your conversions, click the link on the alert you are sent and you gain more knowledge about that user quickly and easily.

NOTE: I just read the Clicky blog, and they are offering a referral based on a review of their product. Please note that I (Linux-Girl) am not an affiliate of Clicky. I utilize the tool and this review is honest and based on actual utilization of Clicky on our clients websites. This is not paid nor was it instigated by the creators of Clicky or their blog post.