When someone visits your web site, your visitor count is incremented by one and a new visitor "session" is started. All actions taken beyond the first one are attached to that visitor session. Sessions "expire" after 30 minutes of inactivity. This means if the visitor leaves and comes back again a few hours later, or they remain on your web site but don't do anything until at least 30 minutes later, your visitor count for the day will be increased again.

Your unique visitor count will only be incremented when a visitor comes to your site for the first time that day. If they visit your site five times in one day, your normal visitor count will be incremented by 5, but your unique visitor count will only be incremented by 1. Clicky determines uniqueness by a combination of cookies and IP address.

This is a sub-set of unique visitors. It represents how many of your unique visitors are first time visitors.

Most services only track page views, but Clicky also tracks file downloads, outgoing links, and javascript events. We group all of these into a term we call "actions". The actions count gives you a much more thorough and accurate picture of visitor activity.

The average amount of time spent on your web site, per visitor.

This figure represents how much cumulative time was spent on your web site across all visitors for the day. If your site gets a decent amount of traffic, this value is typically much larger than "1 day".

The traditional definition of a 'bounce' is a visitor who only views one page on your site and then leaves. However, we do not feel this is a good way to define this metric, as there are plenty of sites whose goal is one page view - e.g. a blog post linked to from Facebook. Clicky instead relies on the visitor's time-on-site - if a visitor is on your site for at least 30 seconds (which our tracking code tells us) then we will say they are NOT a bounce, even if they only have one page view. However, we do honor the definition that any visitor who has more than one page view is not a bounce.

This gives you a general break down of how visitors are arriving at your site, which we primarily calculate by analyzing a visitor's referrer data.

• Direct - How many visitors arrived at your site with an empty referrer string. This usually means they typed in your address by hand or used a bookmark to get to your page.
• Links - How many visitors arrived via a link from another web site, excluding search engines
• Searches - How many visitors arrived by an external search engine
• Media searches - How many visitors arrived from an image-specific search. Other engines and types may be supported in the future, hence the name "media", but for now we only detect Google, Yahoo, and Bing image searches.
• Advertising - How many visitors arrived via advertisements you may be running. We determine this by looking at the domain of the referrer, or if they match a campaign you have setup in our system. If it is a major known advertising domain, or the domain matches certain patterns such as "ad", "ads", or "pagead", then we put the visitor in this category.
• Email - How many visitors arrived via email. Only web mail is supported, however, because clicking on a link from within a program like Outlook will not send any referrer data to your site.
• Syndication - How many visitors arrived via an web-based RSS readers, such as Google Reader, Netvibes, etc.
• Social media - How many visitors arrived via popular social media sites. Supported sites include: twitter, pownce, youtube, myspace, facebook, orkut, digg, reddit, propeller, sphinn, mixx, newsvine, sk-rt, shoutwire, stumbleupon, popurls, fark, metafilter, techmeme, ma.gnolia, flickr, yahoo buzz, del.icio.us, furl, blinklist, dzone, hyves, nujij, ekudos, reporter.msn, and grubb.

When you look at a web page, your web browser sends a whole bunch of data to that page, including something called the referrer. The referrer indicates what page (if any) "referred" you to the current page. For example, if you search for something on Google, and then click on one of the results, your web browser will use the URL of the Google search page as the referrer. This is how Clicky is able to determine what searches and other pages lead visitors to your web site, because our tracking code can access this referrer data. Any time you click a link on a web page, your browser sends the referrer data to the next page you end up on, even if it's on the same web site. Clicky ignores these "internal" referrers, however.

A visitor's organization (and hostname) is determined by looking up their IP address in a third party database. It is not 100% accurate, but close to it. These values represent the company that "owns" that IP address. For example, if someone from Microsoft corporate headquarters visited your site, you would see "Microsoft" as their organization. Unfortunately, many home users can't be identified by anything more accurate than their ISP, which is not nearly as useful. This is why there is an option in your site prefernces to only show a visitor's organization if it is not an ISP. This filter looks for certain keywords in the organization's name, such as "internet", "broadband", "telecom", etc and hides the data if there's a match. This filter is not 100% accurate but enabling it helps the visitors with real organization details to stand out.

A visitor's hostname is what their IP address resolves to for a lookup. For example, one of Google's IP addresses is 64.233.167.99. If a visitor with this IP address came to your web site, then their hostname would be displayed as "google.com". Please see Organizations for more information about this (it works the same way).

An outgoing link is a link on your web site that points to another external web site. Clicky automatically tracks clicks on these links so you can see how your visitor's are leaving your web site and where you are sending the most traffic to. When a visitor clicks an outgoing link, that action will show up in their visitor session, and the total value for clicks on that link will be incremented by 1.

Clicky automatically tracks clicks on any links that point to a file on your web site. Supported file extensions are: 7z, aac, avi, csv, doc, exe, flv, gif, gz, jpg, jpeg, mp3, mp4, mpeg, mpg, mov, msi, pdf, phps, png, ppt, rar, sit, tar, torrent, txt, wma, wmv, xls, xml, and zip. When a visitor clicks a download, that action will show up in their visitor session, and the total value for downloads of that file will be incremented by 1.

Along with page views, outgoing links, and downloads, "events" represents the fourth and final action type. It can be used to track javascript events or clicks on anything on your web site. If your site uses a lot of "Ajax" or plain Javascript for some interface elements (like we do for the dashboard and the spy page), you would probably find it useful to track people interacting with these elements so you can understand their behavior better. However, we don't know what other events you would want to track besides outgoing links and downloads, so you have to set this up manually if you want to use it. Relevant documentation is here.

These are logs of all incoming links and searches that have sent a visitor to your site, in reverse chronological order.

The first time any particular link or search term has sent a visitor to your site (since you have installed Clicky), it will show up in these logs along with the time it occured. Items are displayed in reverse chronological order.

An entrance page, sometimes called a landing page, is the page that a new visitor session starts on. If a visitor comes to your site directly, that will typically be your front page, but visitors coming to your site via searches or other external links will probably be "landing" on other pages initially. The entrance pages section shows which pages are the most popular "first pages" that people see. Likewise, an exit page is the "last" page that a user sees before leaving your web site.

Spy shows you the same data you will see on the main Actions list page, except that everything is live! You will see page views, downloads, outgoing links, and clicks stream down the spy page as they are happening on your web site. It was inspired by Digg Spy. Careful - it's very addictive.

RSS is short for "Really Simple Syndication", and is a way to easily extract chronological data from one web site and display it on another. For example, most blogs have an RSS feed, which contains a list of recent stories, ordered from newest to oldest. Clicky offers a few RSS feeds for chronological data from your web site's traffic, such as recent visitors, recent incoming links, and recent searches. You can access the various feeds by clicking the RSS icon in the Clicky navigation bar at the top of your stats pages. You can use the RSS feeds to display this data on your own web site if you want, or you can put them in an RSS reader such as NetVibes or Google Reader.

If your site has an RSS feed, you should be redirecting it through FeedBurner (FB). This is a third party service that monitors how many subscribers you have to your feed(s), and which items are read and clicked on the most. FB has an API that Clicky can talk to to show you your FB data within the Clicky interface. Once you have setup FB in your Clicky site preferences, there will be a new module available on your dashboard to show you your data. There will also be a new tab in your site's navigation bar with the FB icon , which you can click on to view the data.