I’ve posted about Clicky before, but briefly, they are a web analytics provider (ala Google etc), however they offer quite a significant feature list. One of them being the excellent “Spy” feature which shows you real-time interactions with your website.

Back at the end of July 09, the Clicky team upgraded the Spy feature again, this time with some significant upgrades. I’ve now been using it for a couple of weeks, so let’s check it out:

Interactive World Map

The major upgrade is the new interactive map feature which sits at the top of the “Spy” page. You can literally watch your visitors hitting your website from all around the world, what page they’re on – and a few stats like browser, OS etc. As the users navigate through your site, you can track them and as soon they drop off, they drop off the map – very cool, and very addictive watching in busy periods!

New Page Layout

Previously, the old Spy would give you a text-based list of interactions with your website, with some tabs across the top to see what content is currently popular, plus stats by location, referrers, domains and searches. The problem with this (which Clicky have now recognised) was that you could only look at any of those pieces in isolation, and you’d lose the ability to see the interactive text feed.

The Spy layout has now been updated so that the text feed of interactions is static, with a new additional box next to the map which shows the popular content, and stats by certain criteria.

Filters

What makes this new “popular content” box even more excellent, is its ability to filter. You can cycle through each tab, for example – select a piece of content, select a country, and it will filter the entire pages content (including the map) to those filters, so you can effectively “zoom” down or focus on particular meta data. A really really cool feature.

Conclusion

All in all, this is a great minor upgrade to the already excellent “mega” spy feature from Clicky. For me, it’s definitely the feature I use the most, and as I said above – it’s HIGHLY addictive.

Clicky posted a great video on youtube to demonstrate the new page, check it out:

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