getclicky.com/blog

The new user homepage

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:11:25 -0800

We've had all sorts of requests to improve the user homepage to give a better summary of all your sites with one glance. The screenshot above shows you what we have come up with, which you can see for yourself on your user homepage.

This is basically the Super Mega Uber Dashboard. The Dashboard of all dashboards. But hopefully not as controversial as when we launched the new site dashboard :) Our goal was to make the most amazing, user-friendly, as-much-data-as-possible-but-still-clean-and-efficient interface that could possibly be made to overview the traffic on all of your web sites on one page. There is nothing else like this on the market. Well, not yet anyways. Give Woopra and Piwik a couple of weeks - they'll soon have their own imitation of it.

Here's a quick run down of everything:

By default, for each site you will see today's visitor and action tally, and a graph on the right of the visitor count for the last 30 days.
You can customize the type of data shown for today. Options include visitors, actions, bounce rate, and goals (which includes revenue, if applicable).
Clicking on any of the links under today will refresh the graph with that data type. By default it shows visitors but if you click actions, for example, it will refresh with the daily action tally.
You can change the date range for this tally data with the same options on the normal dashboard - 30, 60, 90, or 180 days, and weekly (26 weeks) or monthly (12 months).
You can sort your list of sites by alphanumeric (default), or any of the data types you have enabled for today - e.g. most visitors, most actions, etc. Your sort preference is remembered until you change it at a later time.
You can also view popular data types for each site. By default the options are searches, links, and pages, but you can customize it to have any and all data types available in the drop down menu.
You can customize how many results are displayed for popular data. Default is 10, but available options range from 5 to 50.
There are global menus (in blue) at the very top. If you change the data type to searches for example, all of your sites will refresh to show your top searches. Very usefeul and amazing.
There is a global date menu shown in this screenshot, but there is a bug with a few of the major web browsers that we haven't been able to fix yet (Surprisingly enough, MSIE is the only browser that actually works 100% correct for this menu. Is it just me or are pigs flying?). Until that is fixed, the global date menu is disabled for all types. But we know you'll find it uber awesome once we get it working right. Being able to, for example, refresh all of your sites with just a few clicks to show the monthly visitor tally, or the top searches from the last 30 days, is insanely amazing.
Option to hide the forums from your user homepage, if you find them distracting.
Customizaton, sorting, dates, and global menus are only available for premium members. Since free members are limited to 1 site and 30 days of history anyways, this really isn't much of a limitation.

Thoughts? We're really happy with it from our own internal use, but we fear our page view limit is going to drop, with so much data available on one page. We know, the page view is dead and all, but still, it's a number that's hard to let go of.

Update

By popular demand, you can now disable the line graphs. This has the unfortunate side effect of disabling the popular data options as well, since they shared the same space previously. When disabled, you will see yesterday and last 7 days instead, as shown below. This brings it back to being quite similar to the old userhome, except it looks a lot cleaner, and you still get the sorting options and the ability to choose a few additional types other than just visitors and actions.

Keep tabs on your twitter followers from Clicky

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:31:57 -0800

We've partnered with TwitterCounter.com to integrate their data into Clicky, via their just released API. This service monitors the number of followers you have on a daily basis. Your Twitter account isn't necessarily tied directly to your web site, but we have so many bloggers and other people who use both Clicky and twitter (us included) that it made sense to integrate this.

All we need is your twitter username, which you can enter in on the site preferences page. Then your follower count will be integrated into the basics dashboard module (you'll notice we also added your FeedBurner count here too):

We also created a simple dashboard module for twitter, if you want to always see the graph by default. (Hot tip: you can also click the red/green percentage next to any item on the dashboard to see its history, including twitter and feedburner):

Check out the Clicky demo to see this all in action!

Anyone have ideas for other third party services that it would make sense to integrate? The two we thought of recently:

- Google PageRank - unfortunately there is no official API to get this data and Google frowns upon any sort of hax0rz to obtain it. Also this number only changes a few times per year at the most for any given site.

- Technorati authority - this service used to be huge but I don't think anyone takes it seriously anymore.

Max date range is now 1 year for all Pro members

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:21:44 -0800

By far one of our most requested features has been to increase the maximum date range limit of 31 days. We've been delaying this because of the performance penalty our servers take when accessing such a large range of data, but we can ignore your requests no longer. As of now the maximum date range has been increased to 1 year. However, because this does take a lot of extra processing, we can only offer it to our Pro members. And be patient. If you do an entire year, it can literally take several minutes to get the data!

We'll be monitoring how this affects the performance of traffic processing. If it's too big of a hit, we may have to decrease it to 180 days. I don't want to do that, 1 year is kind of a magic number, but we'll see what happens.

Also, the dashboard is still limited to 31 days. Pulling up an entire year's worth of data for potentially ALL data types might cause our servers to explode, so we can't offer you that. But on all individual pages other than the dashboard, and including the API, the max range for all Pro users is now 1 year. When you click the Custom data range link in the date drop down menu, it will tell you the max date range for that page. On the dashboard it will always say 31 days, but on all others pages it will say 366 (1 extra day for leap years).

Clicky is now available in 12 languages

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:08:01 -0800

The translations are live! Clicky is now available in Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. You can set your global language from your user homepage by clicking the edit link in the top right corner. This preference will apply throughout the entire getclicky.com. You can also set this preference on a per site basis, from any site's preferences page, if for any reason you want one or more of your sites to be in a language other than your main selection.

Note that none of the languages are fully complete yet, although a few of them are really close. Any phrase that is not yet available in your selected language will simply be displayed in English instead. Also note that we haven't fully implemented the translations throughout the entire site yet. It is about 95% on all pages having to do with your stats, but I haven't gotten it into any of the /user/ pages yet. I'll be working on further integration throughout the week.

Now that you can actually use some other languages, you may be feeling more motivated to help us translate them. We'll soon be rewarding the top contributors with free Pro accounts.

We think this system is going to work really well. It auto-updates every night with any new phrases that have crossed the approval threshold, based on user voting. As new phrases are needed, or as we need to change the copy in certain areas, these will be immediately available on the main translations page and will make it into the live service automatically once they have received enough positive votes. This will help ensure all languages stay up to date.

We definitely expect there to be some inconsistencies within languages, and some things that are just plain wrong. Please contact us with anything you notice that needs fixing. One thing we need to add is the ability to assign admins to certain languages, so they can add, edit, or change phrases as needed, without users having to vote on them. This will make them more accurate and consistent. If you are interested in being a language admin, please contact Sean.

Translations launching by the end of this week - this time, for reals

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:15:01 -0800

We launched our crowd sourced translation framework over 6 months ago. Since then, you've submitted over 6,000 translations, and what have we done with them? Nothing. I apologize. When you run a service like this, things just keep piling up, and it's hard to prioritize.

But this time is different. We are focused 100% on getting this functionality launched by the end of this week. Since April some of the copy on our pages has changed, and we've added quite a bit of new things too, like goals and campaigns. So there are about 150 new phrases to translate. And we'll probably be adding some more as the week goes on.

If you want to help out, the translations page is here. As we mentioned before, we'll be rewarding the top contributors with free Pro accounts, after the system has launched. Thanks for your patience!

Goal and campaign updates

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:30:59 -0800

We just released some updates to the recently announced real time goal and campaign tracking.

But first, an unrelated announcement. Custom data can now be logged incrementally, instead of all at once. Previously when you wanted to attach custom data to a visitor, we only let you do it once. This wasn't a huge issue for most people but we certainly received complaints about it. So now this restrictions is removed. You can log custom data to visitors incrementally as needed throughout a session, which I know will be really helpful to some of you.

Ok, onto the goal stuff:

New features

Goals and campaigns have been added to the API, the mobile/iPhone services, email reports, and Spy.
Conversion rates for goals without funnels are now calculated using the total number of visitors from that date/range
Unique icons for goals and campaigns! The icon you choose is shown in the dashboard modules, in the main goal/campaign pages, in the visitors list (where it is most useful), and in individual visitor details.
In the visitor's list, we were using a blue flag to indicate a completed goal, and a red flag for an incompleted goal. Adding unique icons made us change this however. Now an incomplete goal has the same icon as the completed goal, but it's faded out. Example:

Bug fixes

Case insensitive matching was only working for wildcard matching, and not exact matching.
Trend calculation on main goal page was always -100%
Removed dollar sign next to monetary values (not all of you use dollars after all)
Revenue totals were incorrect for total amounts greater than 1000.

Two features that didn't quite make the cut: First I was trying to make a better dashboard module that showed you more info about goals, but I just couldn't make it look good. I'm a big believer in aesthetics and until I can get it up to my standards I'm not going to release it. Second, we've had a few requests for supporting manual goal completion via ajax/onclick events. This proved more challenging than I thought because our tracking script on the receiving end always expects there to be a page view or other action in there somewhere, which wouldn't be the case here necesarrily. It's a bit complicated to explain.

I really wanted to get these other fixes and new features out though, especially the new icons, so we went ahead with this release anyways. We'll try to add these two things into the next update!

Real time campaign and goal tracking

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 01:29:21 -0800

The wait is over. I locked myself up for 2 weeks and did nothing but work on goals and campaigns. Seriously, I'm about to pass out here. We're really happy to have them out, but we're also really excited because Clicky is the ONLY service that offers either of these features in REAL TIME!

These features are for Pro and trial account holders only. We made them as efficient as possible to process, but there is still a good amount of overhead involved. Until we can gauge how much this affects performance when we have a bunch of sites using it, we are limiting each site to a maximum of 7 goals and 7 campaigns. This limit will be raised in the future. Quick breakdown:

Campaigns

Real time campaign tracking!
Can be triggered by landing page or referring domain.
Wildcards supported for matching
Campaigns can be funnels for goals
Visitors who are attached to a campaign will have this icon next to them in your visitors list
Dashboard module and dedicated tab
More information (excuse the marketing speak)

Goals

Real time goal tracking!
Multiple funnel types: page URL, campaign, external search query (e.g. clicky), external referring domain (e.g. google.com)
Track revenue and costs: per site, per goal, and per visitor
Can use Javascript tags to force a goal to be completed (good for complex scenarios), and customize the revenue for an individual visitor (documentation is on the goal setup page)
Visitors who have completed a goal will have this icon next to them in your visitors list
Visitors who have gone through a funnel but NOT completed a goal will have this icon next to them in your visitors list
A visitor can't go through a particular goal more than once per session, but they can go through multiple unique goals per session
Wildcards supported for both the goal page, and the funnel
Dashboard module and dedicated tab
More information (excuse the marketing speak)

Ooh, added bonus: We've widened all /stats/ pages by an extra 100px, so there's now quite a bit more rooom for your data. Yay progress!

Campaigns and goals aren't yet in the API or iPhone/mobile services, but will be by week's end! Enjoy everyone, and please give us your feedback!

Updates to iPhone service

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:15:32 -0800

We just released some updates to the iPhone service. First, we added some new types: regions, clicks, and referring domains. Second, we removed some excess padding and margins so there is more room for the data. Last, we now properly support landscape mode, so the strings aren't as truncated. Changing between portrait and landscape mode on the fly works really well. I prefer browsing in portrait mode normally, but for some things, being able to change to landscape mode for just that page to see more data is super great. Hope you like it, this has been the biggest request we've had.

Up next for Clicky is campaigns and goals, which are coming along real well. They should be available by the end of next week!

We got a map

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:46:42 -0800

We re-organized things a bit, you may notice a new Locale tab. This is where all the country, city, language etc stuff has been moved to. We also added a new sub-tab, called Regions, but data only started tracking yesterday for it. When you first click the Locale tab, you will see a new map that we've added to the system:

The darker a country is, the more visitors you have had from that country, for the selected date range. You can mouse over any country to get the number of visitors. You can also click on a country which will zoom into that region:

We wanted to add zooming into individual countries, but the API for this product (FusionMaps) is so terrible and inconsistent that it would literally take about 5000 man hours of work to do that. Unless we wanted to spend a billion dollars, there are surprisingly few products of this nature. This one was has the most features and is by far the best looking so it's what we chose. If only the API was a bit more friendly...

We did however add in support for zooming into the United States, as we do have a lot of US customers. And there was actually consistency here, between the Maxmind database and the API, so it was easy to do. Looks pretty good, although I'm not so sure our international customers will be happy with us only supporting our own country. Sorry :P

States are part of the Regions data mentioned earlier, so you can't view data for this prior to Sep 18.

For everyone dying from anticipation for goals and campaign tracking, they are already in progress, don't you worry about a thing now.

iPhone Clicky now has Spy; Generic mobile version also released

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:43:13 -0800

We just released a more generic version of the mobile interface for other mobile phones. It is available at the same address, m.getclicky.com. The iPhone site has been moved to i.getclicky.com. For all of you who have already bookmarked m.getclicky.com on your iPhone, we automatically detect if you have a WebKit browser and redirect you to the iPhone page. We're doing WebKit detection instead of iPhone/iPod detection, since any WebKit browser (such as Android's upcoming release) should have the same features as Safari on the iPhone.

The interface for the generic mobile site isn't the prettiest thing in the world, because cell phones have such a wide variety of quality when it comes to the web browser. So it's just really basic, but it has all the same features/data available as the iPhone. I'll probably add a little CSS in the future to make it prettier, but it gets the job done for the moment.

We also just added Spy to the iPhone version! It doesn't fade in new actions like the normal Clicky does, but it's just as live, so you can leave it open and see new stuff as it's happening, without having to manually reload.

Announcing Clicky for your iPhone

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:43:29 -0800

We released a sneak peak of our new iPhone interface on Friday to some of our users, but we are announcing it officially today. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can point it to m.getclicky.com and use an interface designed specifically for the iPhone.

Please note, this is not meant as a full replacement of Clicky, but rather a supplement for on-the-go. It has most of the features of the desktop service, but it's lacking a few such as visitor filtering and Spy. We know how much you all love Spy and we would like to add that in the future, but the performance on the iPhone is really bad for that type of thing. We'll see what we can do in the future, though! Update: Spy has been added!

We were originally going to make this a full blown app, but Apple's approval process is a big steaming pile of blah. We applied over 3 months ago and have heard nothing back. This is just to get approved as a developer. I've also heard that the approval process for an actual app is a long time too. We just don't want to deal with that. I understand why they want to restrict App store apps to only ones they approve, but they really oughta allow companies to release apps on their own web site too.

Check out all the screenshots on our iPhone web analytics page. Enjoy!

Google Chrome added to browser detection

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:27:42 -0800

Today Google released their new browser, Google Chrome, and we've already added support for it into Clicky, as can be seen by the screenshot below:

I think Google made a lot of good decisions with the design of this browser (each tab its own process, etc). I've been playing around with it for an hour or two and it's pretty slick. Until it adds a bunch more customization, however (more preferences, and extensions like Firefox has), I don't think I could ever use it full time. One preference I really need is focusing on a new tab when it is opened as the result of a middle click on a link. Most browsers default to making new tabs open in the background, but all have a preference to change this behavior. Not Chrome though!

Oh well. I still think it's impressive for a first release.

Update Well, Chrome is certainly a hit. We analyzed the data from all 45,000 sites on our service, and Chrome has a 2% global market share. We made this page that shows the live figure (updated every 15 minutes)!

Flash detection with Javascript to disable line graphs automatically

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:35:03 -0800

Hey everyone, today I added in something to automatically disable the Flash line graphs if we detect that your browser does not have Flash installed. We think this will be particularly useful for those of you who check Clicky constantly on your iPhone, since it doesn't support Flash. This way, when you look at Clicky on your iPhone, it will use our old school bar graphs, but then on your normal browser, it will show the line graphs again, without you having to change the preference back and forth manually.

There are a billion flash detection Javascript libraries for download, but they're all huge because they do a billion things. I just wanted something that detected if Flash is supported at all, or not. So, I cooked up my own script. As usual, MSIE made doing something useful as complicated as possible. What would have taken me maybe 15 minutes turned into multiple hours of testing, testing, testing for MSIE.

It seems to be working really well, but I only tested it on fairly modern browsers. If anyone has any problems with this script (e.g., you have Flash, but it's not letting you use it), please let me know.

Also if there are any Javascript experts in the hiznat, please take a look at my code and let me know if you have any suggestions: http://static.getclicky.com/inc/javascript/flashcheck.js. FYI, I'm only setting the cookie for 1 day, so that if there any problems and I release updated code, the problem will solve itself in 24 hours. Once I'm positive this is working as expected, the expiration time will be much longer.

New widget: Recent visitors

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:12:40 -0800

Yesterday we launched a bunch of widgets. Today, we're releasing another one that shows your recent visitors. I've attached it to the bottom of this post. Showing personally identifying information such as IP addresses would probably scare off your users, so instead this just shows their time of visit, location (name and flag icon), landing page, and referrer (if any).

Clicking on the time of the visit will take you to Clicky to view the session. Clicking on the landing page or referrer will take you directly to those actual pages.

If anyone has ideas for additional widgets, please do let us know.

Also, these widgets are now available for all of our white label customers, too. They are of course branded with your own product name instead of Clicky.

Tons of great new widgets to put on your web site

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:56:38 -0800

We've been hard at work on some great new widgets for you to put on your web site, and we just released them now. For a demo of all of them, check out the new goodies page. These widgets are available to all users.

I've embedded three of them below. They're all highly customizable and designed to be placed on a public web site to showcase any of your stats as you see fit.

To configure any of these widgets for your web site, simply click the get widgets link at the top of your Clicky dashboard. There is also a new sub-tab in the site preferences for setting up widgets.

The first 10 people who put any of these on their public web site and post a link in the comments get a free 1 year Blogger account, or $20 via Paypal if you already have a paid premium account.

The most amazing feature EVER!

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:30:10 -0800

You are going to be blown away when you feast your eyes on this bad boy. That's right, Clicky now offers you the ability to delete a web site yourself. OMG!!!

Ok, really I'm just poking fun at myself for not having implemented this in the 21 months that Clicky has existed. There was a good reason for not allowing you to do this, but it's not really valid anymore. It got to the point where I was getting 5-10 requests per day to delete a site for someone that they're no longer tracking. It was starting to get ridiculous.

So now, I am happy to present to you, the ability to delete any of your web sites yourself. You can do this from your site preferences page. Mark your calendars. This day is historic. I look forward to my daily email load dropping by a good 10-20%.

Clicky now has email reports and they rock

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:07:42 -0800

Professional users can now get email reports for any and/or all data types on a daily, weekly, and/or monthly basis. They are sent in a split HTML/plain format so if you have a good email client they will be nicely stylized. They're completely customizable so you only get the data that you want to get. Each report can be sent to up to 10 unique email addresses.

To setup a report for any site, go to that site's preferences area. There's a new sub-tab called email reports, which is where the magic happens.

Here's a picture of the configuration screen. What you can't see at the bottom is the section that allows you to send the same report for any of your other registered sites (you pick which ones). This allows you to create and manage just one report and then assign it to any of your other sites with a single click.

And here's what the report looks like in Gmail:

Google Analytics probably has the best email reports of any service, because they are basically just screenshots of the actual service. That's really cool, and not something we're capable of doing at the moment. But Google aside, I think our email reports best any other service out there.

Let's take Statcounter for example. They are the #1 indie statistics service, in terms of number of sites tracked. Here's the configuration screen you get with Statcounter. The only data you can get is your visitors and page views count, and the only configurable option is whether you want it weekly or monthly (not both):

And here's what a Statcounter report looks like:

I think we've raised the bar.

New logo

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:19:30 -0800

Many thanks to friendly local graphic designer, Raul Villalobos.

Privacy updates

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:11:17 -0800

Our public demo of the Clicky product has always been of our own traffic data. Some people understandably have had a problem with this, because they don't want their usage of our web site to be publicly available. (Please note this was always in our terms and conditions page, we weren't hiding this fact from anyone). The problem we've had was that our own traffic made such a great demo, because we get a lot of visitors and all the features of the product are used on our site.

But we still agree this needed to change. As of today, all traffic data to getclicky.com is no longer publicly available, including via the API (we changed the sitekey). The public demo is now of our blog traffic, which is pretty small but we don't run any other sites that get a lot of traffic.

There's also the fact that a few of our major competitors just can't seem to stop looking at our web site and its traffic data (yes, we know who you are; Clicky is watching you).

An extra note to people using our API for their own product, many of you have been using our demo site ID/key as the default values, which we agree is a great idea so your widget works even before the user has configured it. Please update your code to use the new demo site ID and key (32020 and 2e05fe2778b6, respectively). If we change the demo in the future, we will always keep our blog traffic publicly available, so this type of change shouldn't be needed ever again.

Clicky API version 3 released

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:01:05 -0800

From the beginning, the stats API has been powerful and always allowed you to extract every piece of data available via our web site into several common formats for a variety of applications. However, if you wanted to recreate Clicky within your own desktop appllcation (and we know there are at least 3 of you working on something like that right now), you had to make a seperate request for each type of data you wanted.

This is bad for us because it creates significantly more load on our servers, and bad for you because it makes your application slower. Version 3 of the API fixes this, and allows you get multiple (unlimited) data types with a single request, by seperating them with commas. Here is an example request that you could use to build a simple dashboard for today, with a single request. This would have taken 5 requests with the old API:

http://api.getclicky.com/stats/api3?site_id=32020sitekey=2e05fe2778b6type=visitors,actions,actions-average,time-average,bounce-rate

Another item that needed fixing was that if you requested a date range, the results returned would always be the total/sum from that entire date range. The only way to get daily values was to make seperate requests for each date - again, bad for us, and bad for you. Version 3 has a new parameter called daily that, if set, will return the results on a per-day basis, instead of the sum.

Here is the same request as above, with daily vallues, for the entire month of June. With version 2 of the API, this would have required 150 different requests. Now we can get it with one: http://api.getclicky.com/stats/api3?site_id=32020sitekey=2e05fe2778b6type=visitors,actions,actions-average,time-average,bounce-ratedate=2008-06daily=1

The last major new feature is support for callbacks and variable assignments for JSON output. This lets you skirt around annoying JavaScript security issues when it comes to cross-domain stuff. Please see the docs for full details and examples.

All of these changes required changing the structure of the results, too. Instead of just a bunch of items, the items now have a date wrapper for each date, and each date has a type wrapper for each type. Those of you familiar with the API already should be able to spot the new formatting in the screenshot below. This new formatting is used even if you only request one type on one specific date, so that your code can work the same for every possible request you could make.

The API documentation has been updated with everything that's new (there are a few other minor things). It also includes a bunch of new sample requests that showcase the new features. The new URL for the API is api3 instead of api2, but api2 continues to work indefinitely, of course.

Ok, that's it!

100 free premium accounts, 50% affiliate commissions

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:57:10 -0800

Sorry everyone, our original July Insanity post was just too complicated and confusing, so we're making it much simpler. We want you to help us promote Clicky, and in exchange, we're giving away 100 free 1 year premium accounts, and also 50% affiliate commissions for the entire month of July.

50% affiliate commissions

Anyone who creates an account in the month of July through your affiliate link, if they ever sign up for paid service you will receive a 50% commission on their first payment, no matter when that actually happens (tomorrow, or next year). This is up to a $50 commission per person! There are no requirements here, just promote Clicky however you want and give out your affiliate link.

100 free premium accounts

The first 100 people who post a full review of Clicky on their blog or web site in the month of July will win a free 1 year premium account. The review must meet the requirements below, and don't forget to include your affiliate link in it as well. If you're willing to do a 3+ minute video review (instead of a written review), we'll throw in an extra $25 cash to the first 10 that do this (we just really want to see a few of these).

If your site gets at least 100 daily visitors on average, you will get a free 1 year Pro account, worth $60. Otherwise, you will get a free 1 year Blogger account, worth $24. Features of the different accounts are listed here.

Review requirements:

300 or more words
1 or more screenshots
The review must be new and original
The review must be displayed on your front page
To win a Pro account, you must have Clicky tracking on the site, so we can verify traffic levels.
Email a LINK to your review to Sean, with Clicky Review in the subject.

Browser and OS versioning is here

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:20:56 -0800

Clicky will now break down the various families of web browsers and OS' into seperate versions. We've added support for a number of new platforms, including mobile and video game consoles. On the dedicated browser/OS pages, everything is grouped together as shown below. On the dashboard, there is no grouping, items are only sorted by popularity. I think there will probably be a preference to change this for both areas of the stats, but for now it works well.

This has been in high demand so we hope you like it. :)

New weekly and monthly views for all data. Yay!

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:22:45 -0800

When we introduced the new line graphs, one key feature of Clicky was removed because it was quite challenging to implement in this new flash software, and we didn't want major differences between the two different views. Also, I was feeling lazy.

This feature was that if you selected last week (for example), it wouldn't just show you the individual days from that week, but instead summed up the total and showed you that number, and went back 11 more periods of the same amount of time and showed you the sum for each of those periods as well. People were using this to easily view monthly and weekly summaries of visitors and actions.

I stupidly assumed no one was using this, but based on the complaints received, I was completely wrong. We hear you loud and clear: you want this back. Well, it's back. Sort of. Different, but vastly improved.

Previously you didn't have the option to view the individual dates from a date range, but could only view the sums. Now, it will always default to showing the individual days, but the date drop down menu within each dashboard module now has two new options: weekly, and monthly. Choosing either of these will show you weekly totals or monthly totals for the previous 12 weeks or months. Shown below is the monthly view for visitors to Clicky:

This date drop down menu was not available before if you had line graphs disabled. This new update fixes that so no matter your preference, you have access to it, as shown below! (However, please note that the date drop down menu for either preference is only available to premium members, since free members only have access to 30 days of history anyways).

You can apply weekly or monthly view to the trend data for individual items as well. For example here is the monthly total of visitors to Clicky that came from netvibes.com:

One other change for line graphs is that before when you compared two pieces of data, they used the same Y scale, which made it hard to compare the different data if one was in the thousands and the other in the tens or hundreds. So now when you compare two pieces of data, they each have their own Y scale, which makes it much easier to compare them. Here is monthly visitors vs actions for Clicky. In this case it does scrunch the data quite a bit since it's in the millions, but for most people, for most views, this will never be the case.

Well, hope you like it! As seems usual for me these days, I don't realize how useful something is until I can actually use it. Why didn't I implement this earlier? Other than not enough time in the day, this seems like just one of those obvious oversights. Glad to have it in, finally. Seeing data summed up monthly for an entire year for any type of data (visitors, actions, or any individual search, page, etc) brings the service to a new level for me, and I hope for you too.

New popular data filters are incredibly useful

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:05:31 -0800

Anywhere you are shown popular data (except the dashboard - coming soon!), you now also have the option of filtering that down so you can quickly find items you are looking for. It's been on my list for a while but I guess I didn't realize quite how useful this type of filtering would be until I was actually able to use it on my own data. So how useful is that? Very. Here's what it looks like (top right corner in red):

So anything you type in this box, the list will be narrowed down to only items that contain exactly what you typed in, whether that match is the whole string, or just the start, middle, or end of it. If the data you are viewing is content related, which means there is both a name and a URL, then the filter is applied to both the name and the URL.

We also support negative filters, which can be even more useful if you use them right. To do a negative filter, just a put an exclamation point in front of it, for example, !bad filter. A negative filter means that only items that do NOT match the filter will get through.

Looking back at that first screenshot, you can see our top 5 searches for today all have the word clicky in them. Well, I want to find the most popular searches that DON'T have the word clicky in them, because these will generally be people who were not looking for us in particular, but just something in general. It's important to monitor this type of data so you can optimize based on it. So I just type is !clicky in the filter box, and here's what we have:

As another example, people obviously come to Clicky to view their data, and all of these pages are in the /stats/ sub-directory. So other than our few VERY high traffic pages (front page, login, and user home page), basically all our popular pages are always individuals looking at their stats. What if I would like to know what our most popular content is, OTHER THAN people viewing their stats? Before, I was SOL :( But now, I am not! I can just type in !/stats to the filter box, and all those pages are removed from the results. Now I only see the popular content outside of the stats directory!

Another unexpected benefit from this is you can use the filters to narrow down your most popular cities based on country or state, which can be really useful to learn more about visitors in a certain locale. We've had a lot of requests from users in the US to add a popular states, or be able to filter down visitors based on state. We plan to add both of these in the future, but in the meantime, there's something new you can do. If you look at your popular cities, you will see that the country is included in the name, and so is the two-letter abbreviated state name for US cities. So if you wanted to just view the most popular cities in Oregon for example, you could do type in OR, USA and you get this:

Or if you run an Oregon centric site, and want to see where you get the most traffic from other than your target market, you specifiy NOT Oregon with !OR, USA:

To top it all off, all of this can be used with the stats API as well, although it has not been added to the docs yet. Since everything is built on the same core, any new features the site gets like this, the API gets automatically - that's always nice. For you programmers out there, when you apply this filter in our web interface, you will see the GET parameter is named filter. Just pass in that same parameter to the API with your request. For example, here is an API call to get Clicky's most popular searches from the last 30 days that don't contain the word clicky.

As usual I've written a novel and I'm sorry. I just like to give examples and cover everything in detail so you can understand how it all works and take advantage of it. Hope you like it!

Now accepting direct credit card payments

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:20:24 -0800

We've wanted this since we launched but adding new features and making Clicky more solid all around has always been more fun and satisfying. Then PayPal completely broke for 10 days and we lost a bunch of money, which made me rethink my priorities. It took longer than expected but I'm happy to finally launch it. If you've been waiting for this feature before upgrading, you can upgrade here!

Paypal subscriptions were working pretty well for us, except for three things. One is that a lot of people hate Paypal - understandable. Another is that Paypal loves to cancel people's subscriptions randomly and without notice. For example if you sign up for a sub with your credit card, and then you card expires a few months later, Paypal will just cancel the subscription without notice, and there's no way to re-enable a subscription - you must sign up for a new one. That's just bad design.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that PayPal subscriptions are set in stone. If a user wants to upgrade from one of our plans to another one, or add more sites or traffic, things like that, there is no way to modify they're recurring payments to reflect that. This has been a major PITA more times than I'd care to remember. What we have been doing is just asking for a 1 year payment for these types of changes, which is ok, but then a year rolls around and that extra revenue doesn't recur, and we must remember to send another invoice.

With credit card payments, we're able to modify subscription values on the fly, and also do extra one time billings as needed. This adds so much flexibility to our service, we're very excited about it. We're eventually going to add a build your own plan [update: this is now live], and the ability to modify your plan on the fly without us having to get involved. Neither of these would be possible with PayPal. But we're still keeping PayPal as an option for people who don't have a credit card or don't want to pay with a credit card.

Paypal has been terribly broken for 10 days and no one's talking about it.

Sun, 25 May 2008 13:29:00 -0800

Everyone's heard Paypal horror stories, but those are typically related to individual accounts, e.g. fraud, random holds on money, terrible customer service, etc. From over 6 years of both personal use, and professional use on Clicky, I've only had positive experiences, so I've stuck with them because of how easy it is to implement on any site.

But now, for the past 10 days, Paypal has had a MAJOR bug affecting ALL ACCOUNTS, and I can't find any major stories about it. Well, this story needs to be told, so here we are. We have already lost thousands of dollars already and we are NOT HAPPY.

So what is this horrible bug? New Paypal customers cannot pay another person or company through Paypal unless they are both located in the same country. This started on May 15 and is still not fixed. Being that 2/3 of our users and money comes from overseas, this is a serious problem. Paypal did not even acknowledge it until May 22, seven days after the issue started. Of course, that acknowledgement isn't on Paypal's actual web site, but just their developer site that probably 0.01% of their customers go to on a regular basis. Helpful!

The problem is a simple drop down box. When a customer enters their billing information into Paypal to pay someone else, the first thing they do is select their country from the drop down. But, the problem is that no matter what country they choose, the page will refresh and automatically switch back to the country of the merchant, which in our case would be United States. As previously mentioned, a majority of our customers live outside the US, and a lot of them are signing up for a new Paypal account just to pay for Clicky. This happens for both subscription signups and invoices, which means we currently have NO WAY to directly bill any of our customers who don't already use Paypal.

As a web developer, I know how easy this problem is to fix. It's a drop down box. This problem could be fixed in a matter of minutes, so why has it taken them 10+ days? How many millions of dollars has this bug cost all of Paypal's customers? I would be so ashamed of myself if I was the one responsible for this bug, that I would quit immediately and go apply for a job flipping burgers, because that would be more my skill level.

It's absolutely unbelievable for a company of this size, that so many internet businesses rely on to collect money from their customers, has had a problem of this magnitude for 10 days and counting.

Un. Flipping. Believable.

Update

So happy this is getting some attention! I submitted it to a number of sites, and both Center Networks and TechCrunch decided it was newsworthy. Valleywag also responded and said they would be writing about it. Hopefully this will prioritize the bug at Paypal. Day 11 now. Unbelievable.

Update 2

A genius user over in the tech crunch comments has posted a workaround for this issue. What it boils down to is using a geolocation product (such as the one we use from maxmind.com) to look up the user's country before sending them to paypal. Then you include country=XX on the end of the paypal URL, where XX is the 2 letter country code (US, DE, FR, ES, etc). Then when the customer goes to pay, the country you sent in will be the default country! Of course, there's no way to 100% guarantee that the country lookup is correct, but most geolocation products are over 99% accurate on the country level, and I'd wager that a 99% chance of selecting the right country is much higher than the chance of both you and your customer living in the same country (which would be ~33% probability for us).

Of course, I'm still EXTREMELY mad at Paypal over all this BS, and we will be dropping them the first chance we get.

Update 3

Day 12 and still no fix. The posted workaround above is working well for us, thankfully, we have successfully taken in money from quite a few overseas accounts now. Thanks, random TC commenter! I owe you a beer.

This has now made it to the front pages of news.ycombinator and reddit. Thanks to everyonw who has been submitting this around the web. I was never expecting this much attention.

Also seeing lots of comments on other sites about how I'm stupid because I don't know what it's like to work on a project as big as Paypal. It is true I have not worked on any projects as big as Paypal that have long deployment times, but that doesn't make this an acceptable excuse. Any company that has long deployment times also needs to have emergency rollout provisions. What if they made an update that brought down the ENTIRE Paypal payment system, for every type of payment, for ALL users. Suddenly ALL eBay users can't pay for their auctions. You're telling me that it would be perfectly fine and dandy for it to be on day 12 now without a fix, and oh they just have lots of servers and it takes a while to change stuff, so hey whats the big deal? Yeah. Ok. Sure thing guys.

Update 4

Thanks to Clicky being so awesome, at least I know people from eBay have been watching. Check out this screenshot of all the visitors to our blog today who are from the eBay IP pool. I assume Paypal is probably part of that, not sure if they share offices or not...

By the way, the problem is still not fixed. And over 25,000 people have read this article now over the past 2 days.

Update 5

Day 13 and still broken.

Update 6

Day 14, issue seems to be resolved now, I am able to choose a country when I pretend like I'm creating a new account.

Two weeks to fix this.

New date selection options

Wed, 21 May 2008 15:35:51 -0800

A long time ago we had a calendar, but you could only view one day at a time. Then we brought in support for viewing more than one day at a time, but the calendar went away. If you knew what you were doing, you could edit the date variable in the URL to access any date or date range you wanted, but most people didn't know that and were stuck with the 10 or so preset options that we had created.

So, as you can see, now we have a new calendar, that includes the ability to select a custom date range. There has been lots of demand for this so I hope everyone likes it. You can access the calendar by clicking the last item in the date selection menu, labeled Custom date range...

:)

Clicky discussion forums are live, get your chat on

Sat, 17 May 2008 13:01:42 -0800

I posted a message on the dashboard yesterday but thought I should post something on here too for all of our RSS readers who don't stop by too often.

We have just launched our discussion forums, which we hope provide a better sense of community, as well as create an established, searchable database of help and feature request topics for future generations to peruse when in need. So stop by and chat with other Clicky users if you'd like :)

Clicky is hiring

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:41:02 -0800

Clicky Web Analytics is growing fast. We are seeking an additional programmer to help us grow even faster. We are offering $36K yearly salary with health benefits, performance based incentives and the possibilty of a small equity stake.

Please send resume as plain text in email body (no attachments) to jobs at roxr dot net.

Requirements:
* You live in the Portland, Oregon area
* You have at least 3 years experience with PHP/MySQL
* You have designed a relational database and are familiar with index optimization
* You know Javascript, in particular jQuery and Ajax
* You know CSS and HTML inside and out, and you prefer to write them by hand because the thought of using a program such as Dreamweaver gives you nightmares
* You have basic Linux skills

Things that would make you head and shoulders above your competition:
* You are a Linux expert
* You have web analytics experience, as an end user or programmer
* You have built widgets on top of a third party API
* You have built computers from parts
* You have experience with high-load applications
* The terms apache.conf, my.cnf, and php.ini mean something to you
* You are decent with Photoshop or equivalent
* You have used some form of source control - CVS, Subversion, etc
* You strongly believe Mario Kart SNES is the best game in the Mario Kart franchise

New visualization tools!

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:11:52 -0800

The default dashboard now includes beautiful line graphing functionality, but if you've customized it at all, then you have to enable it manually. Go to your dashboard preferences (click the icon in your tab bar, then dashboard sub-tab) and check the box For historical data, show line graphs instead of simple HTML bar graphs. Then you'll start seeing things like this:

Don't you just want to eat that because it looks so good?

(Please note: If this is not working on your computer, please email Sean a screenshot of what you see, along with the exact URL in your browser's location bar. I need to know what OS you are using and what browser (including the version), e.g. Windows IE 7, Mac Firefox 2, etc. Also please verify that you have Javascript enabled and at least Flash version 8 installed on your computer. Thanks!)

The date drop down menu lets you choose between last 30 days, 90 days, or 180 days, for whatever it is you are viewing. If you have a custom date range selected (globally speaking), then that option will be shown as well.

The Compare... menu is where things get a lot more interesting! Much like our visitor filtering feature allows you to compare two sub-sets of visitors side by side (example), this lets you compare two pieces of data as well. Except that they don't have to be directly related, although you might find that they are once you view the data. For example you could compare...

Searches for Clicky vs visitors from New York City
Hits to your homepage vs visitors using Internet Explorer
Visitors from social media sites vs bounce rate (Hint: strong correlation)

If you have the line graphs enabled, you can use them to view the historical data for ANY items on your dashboard, or any item in any of the other popular data pages, by clicking the trend percentage figure (the red or green percentage on the right hand side). I mention this because based on our own click tracking (with Clicky of course), not many people view the trend data for individual items, so I thought I'd mention it in case you didn't know how.

Full functionality of all of this is available to everyone through Sunday. After that time, the comparison feature will only be available to Pro members, just like the visitor comparison feature is. The date selection feature will only be available to premium members (any level), since free users don't have access to more than 30 days of data anyways. If you want to upgrade, the upgrade page is here.

Of all the requests we get, this has been in the top 5 for as long as I can remember. I'm so excited to have it in the product finally! I've always liked the simple HTML bar graphs we've had but I knew we needed something new. One of the problems is that I didn't really like any of the available options that I could find - either way too expensive, way too overused (fusioncharts), or just plain old crappy (but usually free). The other problem was that none of us at Clicky know Flash at all, so we were unable to develop our own solution. Then one day recently, someone sent in another email on this subject, but they included a reference to a product called Open Flash Chart. I checked it out and knew almost immediately that this was what we had been waiting for.

I'd like to conclude with some linky love to the developer of this software: Free flash graphs and charts! We're also considering paying him a large sum of money to make some customizations for us, because there's a few things I want to do that I just can't at the moment, one of them being there's no way to have different lines in the graph have unique tool tips. This problem is apparent when you select the same item, previous period option - the date shown for when you hover over the previous period line is the same as the current period, instead of 30, 60, or 180 days ago. I also think the tool tip shouldn't jump around quite as sporadically as it does when hovering over the values. But these are minor issues, so go enjoy the new features already!

New preferences for visitor hostnames and organizations

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:24:10 -0800

It's new-feature-every-day week at Clicky, and today we have something that has been requested a number of times since we introduced the visitor organizations and hostnames. That feature request is to NOT show the organization or hostname in the visitor's list, but instead just show straight up IP addresses. Today, this feature makes its debut. It's off by default so you'll need to hit up your site preferences page if you want to turn it on.

But wait! Before you go and disable orgs and hostnames completely, read on! You see, we added another option that we think makes this feature a LOT more useful. You can now choose to only show the organization if we (Clicky) think it's NOT an ISP (keyword: think). That's been one of the biggest drawbacks of this feature, is that a lot of people are ID'd simply by their ISP, such as Comcast, Verizon, etc. That's useful in some ways but mostly not at all. This new option looks for certain keywords within the organization name and if found, will display the visitor's IP address instead. It's not perfect but works pretty good, and it REALLY helps to make real organizations stand out in your visitor's list.

Here's an example of what a big difference this can make. This is data from one of our own sites being tracked on Clicky:

You can change this preference from your site preferences page (click the gear icon in your site's tab bar, then click the edit site sub-tab).

Hmmm... what new feature will be making its debut tomorrow? Only time will tell!!

New dashboard module: Traffic sources!

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:54:29 -0800

We added a new dashboard module today that breaks down your visitor count between up to 6 different sources. Picture says a thousand and all that so here you go:

This is something I've wanted to do for a long time but it had to wait for some other things to happen first, one of those being processing and storing links much more efficiently. Last week, basically the only thing I did was just that, and managed to shrink the amount of space we were using to store links and searches by 75%! The savings were so big because they weren't normalized at all.

Part of this new processing method is automatically categorizing sites based on their domain. It's not 100% accurate or complete but it does a pretty good job. For example, we decide a site is advertising if it has a sub-domain of ad, ads, pagead (google), including numberic versions (e.g. ad2). We decide a site is email if it has a sub-domain of webmail, email, mail, or mailcenter, again including support for numeric version of those. (This means unfortunately we can only detect this for people using web mail. Visitors coming from Outlook, Apple Mail, etc, don't send any referrer data so we can't know where they came from).

You'll also notice a social media number. This is for sites like digg, reddit, etc - we'll automatically filter those visitors out and categorize them seperately. Supported services are as follows: twitter, pownce, youtube, myspace, facebook, digg, reddit, netscape, sphinn, mixx, newsvine, sk-rt, shoutwire, stumbleupon, popurls, fark, metafilter, techmeme, ma.gnolia, flickr, yahoo buzz, del.icio.us, furl, and blinklist. Obviously we can't support EVERY site in this niche because there are thousands of them, but I think we got almost all the major ones. If anyone has suggestions for others, leave a comment.

Everyone has access to the daily figures shown on the dashboard. But premium members (any level - upgrade) get the added ability to click on these and filter down the visitors who fit into whatever category. For example here is a real popular site that uses Clicky, with the social media filter applied (note the filtering drop down menu is broken for this new feature, I'll get that fixed soon)

As you can see, the rumors are true - social media traffic really is a bit more hyped than it should be. 85% bounce rate! And this is a site that gets nearly 200K daily pageviews :)

Anyways, we think this is pretty cool. We just started tallying this data a few hours ago though so there is nothing prior to today, which is why the trend values are grey and clicking them doesn't show any history.

If you want to try out a demo of it, hit up the front page of Clicky and try the demo - we have this enabled on our stats. And by default, all new web sites will have this module in the top right corner. No existing sites were changed to add it in though, so if you want it, go edit your sites dashboard preferences! Although since it is part of the new default layout, if you haven't changed your layout at all, it will probably appear on your dashboard automatically.

Update on translations

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:05:33 -0800

We're hoping to launch localization by the end of this coming week. All languages that are at least 80% completed will be available for use. There are currently only two languages above that threshold: Spanish (89%), and French (91.9%). Dutch, German and Portuguese are getting pretty close, but everything else still has a ways to go.

We'll be giving away free Pro accounts to the top 3 helpers for EACH language. But don't just go spam the translations in hopes of free Pro access... There is a lot more to this calculation than how many items you submitted or how many times you voted.

If you want to help out, the translation page is here.

A big thank you to everyone who has helped out so far!

FeedBurner's API done got broke

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:40:46 -0800

If you are seeing NO TITLE and NO URL items in your FeedBurner item views and click throughs, this is a problem on FeedBurner's end, which you can verify by looking directly at their API results: http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=getclicky

As you can see, the NO TITLE and NO URL's are coming directly from their API, so there's nothing we can do to fix it. I dont know how long this has been going on as I don't check our FB data too often, but I would expect that it will be fixed relatively soon. This is a Google company, after all.

Linksys Gigabit Switch SR2016: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:40:05 -0800

I just spent 59 minutes on hold and talking to 3 different ESL techs before they finally approved an RMA for the Linksys Gigabit Switch SR2016 that died horribly last month on us, as mentioned here. So I figured, hey, I'll take this opportunity to publicly complain about this terrible product and hope that with this blog's good SEO puts this post near the top of Google et al. for searches such as linksys gigabit switch, linksys switch, and linksys sr2016.

If you are considering buying this product, DON'T. You will regret it. This product is a lemon. Read the reviews at newegg.com - everyone's SR2016 switch dies after 9-12 months. It happened to us and brought our service down for over an hour. It will happen to you. Spend the extra money to buy a quality piece of hardware instead. You will be glad you did. Here is another thread about people having the same problem with 12 ofthe 16 ports dying randomly (this is what happened to us).

That is all.

Update! Google has already indexed this post (man they're fast these days - seriously that was only about an hour!) and the results are fantastic!

Search for Linksys Gigabit Switch SR2016 - first result!
Search for Linksys Gigabit Switch - first page!
Search for Linksys Switch - second page!

That is satisfaction, and it almost makes up for the hour of hell I spent this morning in their phone queue.

getclicky.com/blog

The new user homepage

Update

Keep tabs on your twitter followers from Clicky

Max date range is now 1 year for all Pro members

Clicky is now available in 12 languages

Translations launching by the end of this week - this time, for reals

Goal and campaign updates

New features

Bug fixes

Real time campaign and goal tracking

Campaigns

Goals

Updates to iPhone service

We got a map

iPhone Clicky now has Spy; Generic mobile version also released

Announcing Clicky for your iPhone

Google Chrome added to browser detection

Flash detection with Javascript to disable line graphs automatically

New widget: Recent visitors

Tons of great new widgets to put on your web site

The most amazing feature EVER!

Clicky now has email reports and they rock

New logo

Privacy updates

Clicky API version 3 released

100 free premium accounts, 50% affiliate commissions

50% affiliate commissions

100 free premium accounts

Browser and OS versioning is here

New weekly and monthly views for all data. Yay!

New popular data filters are incredibly useful

Now accepting direct credit card payments

Paypal has been terribly broken for 10 days and no one's talking about it.

Update

Update 2

Update 3

Update 4

Update 5

Update 6

New date selection options

Clicky discussion forums are live, get your chat on

Clicky is hiring

New visualization tools!

New preferences for visitor hostnames and organizations

Visitors online now

New dashboard module: Traffic sources!

Update on translations

FeedBurner's API done got broke

Linksys Gigabit Switch SR2016: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE