Rethinking analytics

As my man Steve Rubel is fond of saying, the page view is so Web 1.0. I don't think it will ever fully lose its relevancy -- there are still plenty of people who wrongly believe the number of megahertz in your computer is all that matters -- but in an ever-growing Ajax world, there is a lot more to your traffic than this aging metric.

The release of our new tracking code allows us to track some new user interactions with your web site out of the box: Outbound links and file downloads. But a lot more is on the way. For those of you with Ajax or JavaScript heavy sites, Clicky will soon enable you to track every action a user makes on your site.

For example, on our site right now we have no way to know how often people are clicking the Calendar popup box to change the date. Sure we can see date changes in the logs, but that's not a very friendly interface to get that data. With our upcoming API, we will be able to attach an action to that popup window, and can track that action by a custom name in our log such as "Calendar popup" so we know a user clicked that. If your Ajax site supports "states" that can be recreated via GET variables, you can log that too. That way when viewing your action log, you can be taken directly to what your user saw as the result of anything they did on your page. No other service offers this.

We think "actions" is a good name to group all of this stuff under. As you will see, there is a new section called "actions" that shows every user interaction with your web site that we are able to track at this time. This is very similar to the old "clicks" page, except now it shows a lot more than just page views. By default you'll see everything, but with the new subtabs you can filter the actions down to searches, links, outbound links, file downloads, or good ol' fashioned page views. Once the API is done, there will be a new subtab called "custom" which will show all the actions you have created within your application, with additional filter options to see just the ones you want.

We're so excited about this. Stay tuned.