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Are there any tools availible for tracking users clicks on a website, both internal and external? Preferably one that is free and can track a series of clicks from a user (Example, user clicked 'blog' then 'archives' then a particular article)

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Following this, I'm also looking for one that can just go by server side logs. – Tim Post♦ Aug 2 '10 at 15:47

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I personally use https://www.crazyegg.com/ they have a great service. For funneling you can use http://www.kissmetrics.com/ but it has a pricey tag on their service.

Not too sure about internal trackers.

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up vote 1 down vote

If you are looking for free Google Analytics is your best bet. It not only gives you a what links where clicked on by name, but it also gives you what links were click on the page using a simple heat map. I say simple because it won't tell you where on the link that the user clicked on each page, just what % of the clicks on each link on a page. It doesn't matter if the clicks are inside or out I believe.

If one you want something more complex, then you will need Crazy Egg or Kiss Metrics as Thorn007 stated.

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If only Google wasn't so useless for me. A substantial number of my visitors use noscript. I keep waiting for a start up focused on server side stat processing, so I can go work there :) – Tim Post♦ Aug 2 '10 at 16:19
@Tim: Is it really possible to do server side stat processing? Javascript is the only way to get a ton of the stats out there. Any ideas? – RandomBen Aug 2 '10 at 16:44
@RandomBen - Sure, the web server records every request, its just a matter of filtering out what you actually want to see. – Tim Post♦ Aug 2 '10 at 17:43
@Tim How should you track external links with your server logs? (Without making an url redirector of course) – neo Aug 3 '10 at 14:55
@neo - that's just it, you can't track external links without using a redirector. But, with tabbed browsing, you can't even be sure that someone actually left your site to begin with, aside from the lack of activity while they were in another tab. I'm mostly just interested in what people do while active. – Tim Post♦ Aug 3 '10 at 15:03
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up vote 1 down vote

Some server side tools:

A key difference between server side analysis and javascript based analysis is that the js versions will fire a request when a user reloads a page in the browser cache. The server side versions will report only what comes to the server. Neither is inherently "better" - just different. Wikipedia's article on web analytics discusses this further

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up vote 0 down vote

I recommend open source (PHP - based on Zend Framework) web analytics Piwik. It is now at version 0.8 and recently get server side tracking API so you can still track those who use noscript or old mobile phones. It's also plugin based so you can explore the list of available 3rd party plugins or build your own. It does click tracking but may not present it easily enough for you, so maybe you do need to write your own plugin for this (don't forget to share it though ;)

If you don't mind spending some money then I recommend getclicky

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