Before deploying my site live, I wanted to have some sort of basic analytics where I could see the following:
- Page views
- Online count
- Button/link clicks
- Which social media link in footer was most popular
- Which project was most popular
- A user journey i.e. in the time they were on the site what did they do (fits in with the above too)
By default I straight away started to setup Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. I've 'worked' previously with both due to paired programming where the other developer had much more knowledge than me. I knew what data I wanted to collect and now was time to set it up.
What I expected would be some brief research, turned into dozens of tabs being opened looking for a simple tutorial. I scrapped that idea and turned to research again to find an alternative because I wanted my site deployed ASAP so wanted something ideally quick to setup and easy/clear to understand.
Clicky Web Analytics
It's worth mentioning that Clicky is free to use but also has paid plans.
After some very brief research I came across a post where a user recommended using Clicky over GTA and GA after using it for his sites for over 10 years. So, that sounds good right? 10 years is a long time.
Quick setup
I created an account with https://clicky.com/ and setup a new website for my domain. From start (setup) to finish (seeing live stats) there was no need to look for external tutorials.
I added the provided script tag into the index page page of my Angular project and then for each link I wanted to track i.e. social media and project, I added a bit of code.
Every time that link ^ gets clicked, I know about it. It's super interesting for me, as the developer of the site, to know which projects people are clicking on more than others, which pages are popular etc. It's amazing.
I added a tag on my CV link in the menu purely out of interest to see if anyone would download it and if so how many times.
And one last screenshot regarding outgoing links.
Clicky is super easy to use and I can find out the info I want to know fast. I will for sure keep using it and for future sites I do. 💃
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