Tracking your website traffic, sources and interactions is crucial to any company that has any online presence. The more you know about where your visitors are coming from, what they searched for to find you and what they did on your site once they did find you, the better you can focus your efforts to grow your business.

The Standard

Most of you are probably familiar with Google Analytics. Google's plethora of web service tools have become the industry standard for companies of all sizes. Here at CATS, we were using Google Analytics to track all of the traffic to our website, our customer career portals and even the CATS Applicant Tracking System itself. We were running in to a few issues though, that made us reengage our search for a powerful but user friendly web analytics tool.

The first issue we were having was that Google Analytics could not track actions taken on career portals that have domain masking in place. For those that are unfamiliar, CATS has the option for you to place your own sub-domain on your career portal URL. This does wonders for your search engine ranking but was generating conflicts with our tracking reports. The other major issue was that, although Google's service is robust and can provide in depth metrics, the user interface was too complicated and wasn't very friendly for the non-techy. It also required a lot of development work and set up to get it tracking and reporting properly. We were constantly having to adjust our settings to get the most accurate reports. Last but far from least, Google does not provide real time analytics (among many other features)! Anytime we would access our account we were looking at data from previous days and never an absolutely accurate and up to date view.

The Replacement

One of our new developers' first project was to get Google Analytics tracking and reporting properly and to have it set up so anyone in the company could go in and be able to easily pull out whatever information they were looking for. He immediately saw some fundamental issues that helped us realize that Google Analytics was not the right tool for our needs. Instead of fighting with the current system, he brought in Clicky Web Analytics.

This web tool has a clean and easy to navigate user interface. The first time I logged in to see how my blog traffic was looking, I was able to find it with no assistance, get exactly the information I needed and more than I was able to with Google. It also has no problem tracking hits and actions from our "masked" career portals. Set up was a snap and it has been tracking perfectly since the get-go. There are a host of other features that Clicky offers that none of the other major web analytic providers have, most importantly, real time results!

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What do you use to track your website traffic? What has been your experience with any of the other systems out there? Is there one you would recommend?

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