Clicky is a 3rd party traffic stats service that can provide you with additional analytics about your lens. I previously reviewed StatCounter and SiteMeter, which are two alternative services.

Once you've registerd and added Squidoo as a site, Clicky will provide you with some tracking code. With a little bit of rummaging you'll be able to find the 'Non-Javascript version' which will be invisible to visitors. All you need to do then is paste the code into your Lensmaster profile. The tracker will automatically appear (so to speak) on all of your lenses that use the default bio. (You'll need to edit your other lenses.)

When you open your dashboard for your site, you'll see an overview of your visitors, actions (page views) and other metrics (screenshot). Some of the boxes on your dashboard will be useless due to the limitation of the tracking code. You can customise your dashboard, and remove 'Traffic Sources', 'Links' and 'Sources'. You do this by clicking on 'Customise my dashboard' and dragging the boxes into the red outline on the right. Have a fiddle with it until you're happy with the layout. Personally I like to have the two graphs at the top.

By default, the summary is for today. In the top right corner, there is a drop-down menu for the period you want to see: Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, etc. One annoyance (for me) is that the 'Last 7 days' includes Today, which makes the graphs dive at the end. I often choose a 'Custom date range' and shift the period back by one day.

Once you've picked the period you want, jump to the 'Content' tab. This will show you all your lenses, and how much traffic they've received during the selected period. The percentage on the right of each lens is how much the traffic has gone up or down compared to the previous period. For example, you can see which lenses are doing better or worse this week than the week before. I find this very useful.

Click on the percentage number for a given lens, and you will get a chart of the traffic for the last 31 days for that lens. For the first time, you can visualise the traffic coming through your Lensmaster profile page. Nice.

If you want to see where your visitors are coming from (countries, cities, etc), click on Locale.

There are a few other handy features, but what I've written here is the stuff that I find most useful. There are other 3rd party statistics services, but I think this one is perhaps the best. It has an upper limit of 3,000 page views per day, compared with 500 or 100 for the other two I've tried. I've not seen any other package that has a comparison with previous periods. Clicky have a table of them vs. the other guys at the bottom of their homepage.

When you signup, you get the Pro package for 14 days. Most of the extra features you get are not much use to a Lensmaster, so you won't really miss them after the trial period. The exception to this is the ability to block your own visits, which you can only get if you upgrade. For $29.99 per year, this is very nearly almost worth paying for, if you like your stats to be accurate. The most basic upgrade also allows you to add 2 additional sites, removes the ads, remembers 6 months worth of data and can email reports to you.

There you have it. I shall probably build a lens out of this review and my previous one. I'll let you know when it's ready..

Last edited by thefluffanutta (10/15/2008 2:12 pm)