Now you can track all your twitter movements automatically with the latest FREE research tool just released by FlowingData. Appropriately named your.flowingdata, it’s only a quick 2 minute setup and then the webapp will start collecting all of your twitter data for you to later explore with built-in tools that resemble IBM’s Many Eyes dashboard. As with any behavioral analysis tool, the more data you have the better the results will be so I can easily see this tool being widely used by researchers and interactive planners alike for a seriously long time (I wonder if they have any personal database limitations that would prevent one infinite 365 day data-stream?). Worried about exposing your private twitter habits? Have no fear my friend, all the data collected is automatically set to ‘private.’ If at a later date you’d like to release it to the masses then that’ll be up to you, but for all you tin-foil hat wearing twitter users – you’re secrets are still safe.

Here are some screen shots showing a sampling of the reports that are built-in to the dashboard, they look amazing!

Website analytics are key to any successful website. If you are trying to increase traffic to your blog or website then you’re probably using some form of tracking software. Now in the free/cheap market there are a lot of choices. Over the years I’ve used a variety of different services and/or software to track visitors to my websites however I always tend to gravitate back to two specific programs – Google Analytics and Clicky.

Every now and then I get an email asking me what analytics service is “better” or which I’d recommend for their website. This post should answer those questions as I try to compare key features of the two services in a head-to-head matchup. Let’s get it on!

Google Analytics vs. Clicky:
(Disclaimer: I’ve only reported on features that make the two services unique from each other, each service has a lot of shared functionality)

Google Analytics
Cost: FREE
Users: Unlimited
Websites: Unlimited
Traffic Limitations: 5 Million Pageviews/Month (Removed if you’re an active AdWords customer)
Works without Javascript? NO
Affiliate Program: No
Reports: PDF, XML, CSV, TSV
Latency (How often is it updated): 1-24 hours
Goal/Conversion Reporting – The ability to setup goals/conversions to record specific visitor actions (i.e. filling out a form). You can then segment your conversion goals based on any number of variables including Geography (i.e. how many people from Pasadena filled out the form).
Adwords Integration – Yes. You can link-up your AdWords account to any website for automated integration. The non-adwords PPC tracking is great although sometimes it can be unreliable.
Email Reports: Custom reports that will trigger at specific time/days (i.e once a month).
Visitor Data - You can see the connection speeds of your visitors, this can help you determine what type of content you can display without increasing load-times for your users.

Clicky Web Analytics
Cost ($ is per month): FREE (3 sites/1k daily pageviews), $4 (3 sites/10k daily pageviews), $9.99 (10 sites/30k daily pageviews), $16.99 (20 sites/50k daily pageviews)
Users: Unlimited (by enabling “Public Access”)
Websites: Depends on plan, see above
Traffic Limitations: Depends on plan, see above
Reports: CSV, XML and JSON
Latency (How often is it updated): Real-time
Email Reports: Yes. Sent at a user-defined action (date/time, # of visits, etc..)
Works without Javascript: YES
Affiliate Program: Yes
Custom User Tracking – Yes. Clicky lets you give your users custom names, tracking their every visit to your website in an easy to review “User” page.
Real-Time Statistics – Yes. Spy lets you view real-time statistics of visitors currently on your website.
Traffic Sources - Segments out social media and email sources – View all visitors who came from a social media website (twitter, Stumbledupon, Facebook, etc..) or from a link found in an email.
Visitor Information – Clicky can automatically convert visitor IP’s into hostnames (e.g. comcast.net) and Organizations (e.g. Microsoft Corp).
Whitelabel: YES (You can setup your own white-label version of the tracking software to sell to clients)
Developer API: Yes. You can pull just about any data/statistics from your account via their API.
Extras: Clicky sponsored widgets (for your own tracking and for public bragging rights), official WordPress plugin, integrated with FeedBurner RSS stats and the ability to get any statistics via a customized RSS feed.

Things both Google Analytics and Clicky share:

Which should I choose for my website or blog?

- Small blog with no affiliate or PPC marketing: Clicky
The free version of Clicky is a lot easier to use for small website publishers. If you don’t have a need for advanced user or source segmentation, then there’s no real need to use Google Analytics. You can also use the SPY feature to view real-time visitors on your site.

- Medium-Large website or blog with PPC or other marketing campaigns (visitor generating): Google Analytics
Until Clicky implements campaign tracking, Google Analytics will win if you’re trying to track multiple PPC campaigns.

- Medium size website or blog with affiliate or other 3rd party advertising (revenue generating): Clicky
This was a tough choice. They both are great in tracking the path that users take on your website, which is useful in seeing at what point in the visit are they clicking on your advertising/affiliate links. While Google may give you the ability to track specific actions as Goals, it only allows for 5 and because of its reporting latency, makes it not a viable source for account purposes. Clicky won because of its ability to track and tag visitors. You can take the users who clicked on your advertising and put them in a custom group, giving you detailed analytics on their demographic.

- Large website or blog (regardless of whether or not it has advertising): Google Analytics
Clicky’s Professional service can be expanded to work on websites that get up to 300,000 daily page views, however by then you’re paying enough to go with a more detailed reporting service like WebTrends, ClickTracks or Urchin 6 (There’s also Omniture, who makes a variety of different tools but is also very expensive!). Google Analytics also offer a more robust campaign segmentation compared to Clicky.

To note: Both of these programs use either Javascript and/or image tracking to report website traffic. There are a lot of free log analyzers available that can give you a different view on your website visitors. It’s always a good idea to use both a back-end log analyzer, like Awstats or Webalizer, in conjunction with one of these services. A log analyzer won’t give you as much information as products like Google Analytics or Clicky can, but it will report on ALL the visitors to your site, regardless of whether or not they have javascript enabled.

Tired of poor open rates on that email newsletter you send out? The problem might not be the subject content, but actually it’s length.

Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx (a London based agency) claims that through massive amount of analytics that he has discovered the perfect length for your subject line to increase the open rate.

In an article put out by MediaPost, he states that having your subject line be close to 50 characters is the primo length – claiming to have found this after going through over 250 million messages sent over the past two years with over 660 different subject lines. “A 50-character subject line touting a ‘powerful’ offer is appealing (30% off Spring Getaway flights to Florida on Delta).”

He also says that the longer, 80 character-plus subject lines result in higher open rates as well. The example he gave when delivering his findings last Saturday at MediaPost’s Email Insiders Summit was a subject line used to describe the contents of a newsletter – “Find out Secrets to Spice up your Barbecue this weekend and all Summer Long and enter to win a New Weber Grill.”

Having a subject line thats less than 50 characters, or between the 60-70 character range, resulted in a decrease in delivery as well as open-rates.

He was quick to admit that this theory goes against “traditional” wisdom used to optimize email campaigns but cites his research as proof. Either way, it is an interesting theory to check out. Any comments or first-hand experience with this phenomenon would be appreciated. Was this coincidence or is 50 really the magic number?