We added a new dashboard module today that breaks down your visitor count between up to 6 different sources. Picture says a thousand and all that so here you go:
This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but it had to wait for some other things to happen first, one of those being processing and storing links much more efficiently. Last week, basically the only thing I did was just that, and managed to shrink the amount of space we were using to store links and searches by 75%! The savings were so big because they weren’t normalized at all.
Part of this new processing method is automatically categorizing sites based on their domain. It’s not 100% accurate or complete but it does a pretty good job. For example, we decide a site is “advertising” if it has a sub-domain of “ad”, “ads”, “pagead” (google), including numberic versions (e.g. “ad2”). We decide a site is email if it has a sub-domain of “webmail”, “email”, “mail”, or “mailcenter”, again including support for numeric version of those. (This means unfortunately we can only detect this for people using web mail. Visitors coming from Outlook, Apple Mail, etc, don’t send any referrer data so we can’t know where they came from).
You’ll also notice a “social media” number. This is for sites like digg, reddit, etc – we’ll automatically filter those visitors out and categorize them seperately. Supported services are as follows: twitter, pownce, youtube, myspace, facebook, digg, reddit, netscape, sphinn, mixx, newsvine, sk-rt, shoutwire, stumbleupon, popurls, fark, metafilter, techmeme, ma.gnolia, flickr, yahoo buzz, del.icio.us, furl, and blinklist. Obviously we can’t support EVERY site in this niche because there are thousands of them, but I think we got almost all the major ones. If anyone has suggestions for others, leave a comment.
Everyone has access to the daily figures shown on the dashboard. But premium members (any level – upgrade) get the added ability to click on these and filter down the visitors who fit into whatever category. For example here is a real popular site that uses Clicky, with the “social media” filter applied (note the filtering drop down menu is broken for this new feature, I’ll get that fixed soon)
As you can see, the rumors are true – social media traffic really is a bit more hyped than it should be. 85% bounce rate! And this is a site that gets nearly 200K daily pageviews 🙂
Anyways, we think this is pretty cool. We just started tallying this data a few hours ago though so there is nothing prior to today, which is why the trend values are grey and clicking them doesn’t show any history.
If you want to try out a demo of it, hit up the front page of Clicky and “try the demo” – we have this enabled on our stats. And by default, all new web sites will have this module in the top right corner. No existing sites were changed to add it in though, so if you want it, go edit your sites dashboard preferences! Although since it is part of the new default layout, if you haven’t changed your layout at all, it will probably appear on your dashboard automatically.
