Clicky stats gets even better with new “Megaspy” feature

Duncan Riley — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:02:12 +0000

Web stats service Clicky has rolled out the beta of “Megaspy,” a new multi-function live statistics extension.

Megaspy takes the original “spy” feature in Clicky that lists traffic hitting your site in real time, and makes the data far more useful than just an updating list of pages being hit on a site. Along with streamed actions, Clicky users can now see live totals including which pages visitors are on, what links they’ve come from, searches, countries, cities, browsers and operating system.

Although a lot of what Clicky offers duplicates Google Analytics, the live data has always been the biggest value proposition, at least it was for me when I signed up back in November. Megaspy builds on that data, delivering more useful live stats that take it towards Whos.amung.us, although it doesn’t do charts or hour by hour comparisons yet.

Megaspy is available to free users of Clicky during the beta, but will be restricted to paid users once the beta period is over. Another reason to sign up for a reasonable priced paid account.

Is Google Analytics under-reporting your traffic?

Duncan Riley — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:28:39 +0000

A couple of weeks back I noticed that the figure being reported by Google Analytics representing our page views was less than our ad impressions. There is room for variance, for example the top leaderboard also appears on QBase, which isn’t in our overall traffic count, although I have access to figures for the site. Although QBase occasionally has some strong traffic, the gap wasn’t accounted for; it was clear that either our ad service was overcounting impressions, or Google Analytics was wrong.

Then it got weirder. We run Adsense units as remnant inventory, and on a couple of days Adsense was showing a higher page count than Analytics was. Something was clearly wrong. I did some digging and while there has been issues with Google Analytics in the past, nothing explained what I was seeing.

Then I worked it out. We may not have the quickest page load at The Inquisitr, but I’ve always been wary of not making the site bloated to load, like Mashable (which was up at one stage to 2mb on the front page) and TechCrunch (which has slimmed back, but was traditionally a heavy load). There are external factors I can’t control, the ad serving for one, and then services like Lijit and Outbrain do slow the site down, sometimes more than others. But still, the load isn’t horrible. And yet when I started the site, I was focused on delivering the content first, with the rest to follow. The header naturally leads with the content following, but the rest of the sidebar then eventually footer loads after that. Some times the load time can be seconds, other times (and depending on your connection and whether you’ve visited the site before) it can be out to 30 seconds or more. I realized that the difference, even between the post footer ad and the sidebar ad were that people were hitting the site and leaving it before the other things had loaded. And where was the Google Analytics code you ask? Last thing loaded in the footer.

Google recommends that you put the code for Google Analytics in the footer, and I’m not about to tell you to disagree with them, but a couple of days back I swapped the code from the footer to the header, and 2 days in all of a sudden my ads views are a close match to my Google Analytics page views.

There’s no rorting of the system in what I’ve done. In the early days, Google actually suggested you place the code up front. The down side is that running javascript up front can decrease your load times, but so far I’ve found the difference minor at best.

If you’re running a WordPress blog and thinking of trying the code up front, it must reside after the body tag, but if it’s in your header and that’s the first part of a page load, it’s a 99% bet that every page view will be counted.

The Inquisitr » google analytics

Clicky stats gets even better with new “Megaspy” feature

Is Google Analytics under-reporting your traffic?