We just released an update that’s been two months in the making. On the surface, there are only a couple of major differences you’ll notice, but they are very cool ones for sure. What took so long was designing and implementing an entirely new system for how we store page URLs, and converting all of the existing data into that new format (many hundreds of millions of database rows). This fixed a couple of annoying problems we’ve had with the system from the beginning, and let us build some awesome new features on top. Let’s get to it.
Filter visitors by page!
You can now filter your visitors by a page they have viewed. This has been a big request. Works in the API too, just use the parameter “href” with the “visitors-list” type.. You should only be sending the path and query (e.g. everything AFTER “http://yoursite.com”), unless the page you want to filter by is on a mirror or sub-domain, or it’s an outbound link. For example here’s how we’d grab all visitors who saw our /users/ page, and all visitors who clicked our company’s web site in our footer (http://roxr.net)
http://api.getclicky.com/…type=visitors-list&href=%2Fusers%2F
http://api.getclicky.com/…type=visitors-list&href=http%3A%2F%2Froxr.net%2F
New visitor segmentation!
When you filter your visitors by anything, the only type of summary data you used to see was basically everything from “the basics” dashboard module, but applied to these visitors. But now you can see anything you want about them – top searches, top countries, etc. This is particularly useful when filtering by page. Now you can see the top searches hitting any page on your site for example. We plan to add on to this quite a bit this coming week, so for now it’s slightly rudimentary, but it performs its purpose well. Click on the red “View these visitors…” link (shown below) to choose what type of data you want to see. This feature is for Pro members only.
Links so hot you’ll want to eat them!
Links to external content now hide the protocol by default, which saves precious space (particularly on the dashboard). We’ve also changed it so it highlights the domain name and the rest is slightly faded. This is inspired by the Google Chrome address bar – I really like how easy it is to pick out the domain when looking through links now.
Also, when viewing your visitors list, there is now an icon next to the referrer to indicate which type of referrer it is (search, social media, etc).
Links to external content have changed!
Used to be when you viewed your “links” or your “content”, clicking on an item would take you directly to the external page. That’s useful but inconsistent with how the rest of the site works, where clicking on anything else (search, country, etc) would instead filter your visitors by that item. Links and content have been changed to match this behavior in all areas of the site. Now, anytime there is an external link, there will be this arrow next to it. Click that arrow to be taken to the external link. You can see this in the screenshot above.
Much better support for sub-domains and mirrors!
If you had multiple domains pointing to the same site, or had the same code on a bunch of sub-domains for one site, you couuld still track that fine, but the “content” we tracked was never linked to the right domain that it was actually viewed on. Now, we’ll store the domain it was viewed on, if it’s anything other than what you have in your “hostname” field in your site prefs. Example:
No more dupes!
The new pages system gets rid of the dupe problem for your content. Unique pages used to be determines by a combination of the URL and the title. This resulted in a lot of duplicate entries for the same page, because of reasons like the visitor having Javascript disabled (no title), the visitor using an old browser sending us the title formatted slightly differently, etc. This will happen no more, although it will only affect your stats from this point forward.
In conclusion!
That covers all the new features that are obvious on the surfage. We hope you love them like we do, but as always leave your feedback, good or bad, below.
Also, there are a few gotchas that might catch you off guard. Let me cover that. First, pages will not have any titles until they get a page view under the new system. This is related to getting rid of the dupes problem. Give it a few days and almost all of your content will have titles again. Obviously your popular content should already.
Second, filtering by page may not work right away for all of your pages, because there were so many duplicate IDs. If “your” ID for a URL was not the “first” ID for that URL in our system (on your database server), then they don’t match up right in the database. So filtering by a page URL may only work for some of your pages from “this point forward” (as I seem so fond of saying). I do have an idea of how to fix this so filtering will work for all pages, for any date, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow so I can test it.
Last, the new segmentation drop down menu doesn’t work right in MSIE. I could not figure out the problem before release, but I will try my hardest to get it fixed on Monday.
Ok, now go enjoy the new features!
