Early on in the creation of your blog, you will realize that it’s helpful to keep track of your site’s traffic. Looking through your blog’s reports can be very helpful in fine tuning your efforts towards making money.
There are many programs out there to help you keep track of your blog’s progress. Many users use programs such as Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a good free web analytics tool. I use it to get a good general picture of how my blog is performing on a weekly basis. However the one downside of Google Analytics is that it doesn’t provide real time statistics. You can only get information up to the previous day. The best use for Google Analytics is tracking your blog’s historical data. For real time tracking, I use program called Clicky Web Analytics.
While it’s good to get historical tracking data, I find it useful to get up to the minute data in real time as well. Using the historical data is good for deciding how to make large sweeping adjustments for your blog. Most of the time, you want to also see the real time data to see how your blog is performing through the course of the day. This precise data allows me to make minor adjustments to my blog and catch problems as they occur. It’s also a thrill to actually see my visitor numbers ticking up through the day. I must admit, it can get somewhat addictive to watch your site’s numbers in real time.
In addition, Clicky provides a couple of extra real time services that you won’t find in other programs. Their Spy and RSS features allow a webmaster to get real time data about their visitors as they are surfing your blog. You can get up to the second information about what information is important to your visitors. This way, you can get a combination of the historic data as well as the live data from your site.
Clicky provides both free and paid plans to select from according to your site’s needs. It’s definitely a good real time alternative to the other competitors out there.
Hey Rich,
I agree, tracking your blog/site's statistics is a must. I use Google Analytics, and I haven't heard of Clicky before. I'll definitely take a look at it since it seems to provide some additional tracking that could be beneficial to blog owners.
I love using both to keep track of my site. It's actually really addicting to be able to see your sites stats in real time.
Your are absolutely right Richard.Tracking our blog is very important as we know where we stand and use that stats to improve our site. Good post!