As you may know, Cligs is mobile phone friendly - it automtically detects mobile phones and serves a trimmed down version of the Cligs interface.

But wouldn’t be great to use the Cligs bookmarklet on your iPhone too? Well a Cligs user, Brendan from Malleable Musings, explains how in his blog post Cli.gs and the iPhone.

Very neat! Thanks, Brendan!

I get a lot of questions about Cligs and how it works and the stats it shows, so I thought instead of answering common questions individually, I would answer them here for the benefit of everyone. This is the first of a hopefully regular feature. So ask away

Today’s question: What are the "no referer" hits that show up in the clig statistics?

Answer: This is most common when cligs are posted on social sites like Twitter. It has two main causes:

• Bots (crawlers)
• People clicking through from desktop clients

Let’s stick to posting a clig on Twitter example. Lots of services keep track of the links posted on Twitter like MicroBlogBuzz, TwitterBuzz, and Twitturly. These services are useful and fun, but there are others that may not be as nice to have around. Regardless, all of these services need to check out the URLs that are posted on Twitter, and they do that by sending out a bot (also called a crawler or robot or spider) to fetch the URL, and this gets logged by Cligs because it’s a perfectly valid request of your clig. Other good example of no referer hits are GoogleBot, Yahoo! Slurp and msnbot that index the web for Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live search engines. These are logged by Cligs and they get their own special section in the Cligs analytics.

The other main reason is someone clicking on the link from a Twitter desktop client or an email client (if the clig is emailed). This will open a browser window or tab that requests the clig without giving any referer info because there isn’t one.

There are other minor reasons but the above two reasons cover 99% of the cases.

And again, any questions you’d like answered, just drop me a line.

Over at SEO Scoop, commenter Al asks a very good question:

In your example of creating multiple cligs, why would you need to do that when you mentioned above it that the analytics includes referral information?

The answer is tracking the sharing (spread) of the clig over time. Let’s take an example.

Suppose we create two cligs, say Clig1 and Clig2. We share Clig1 in a Facebook account and share Clig2 in twitter. Our referral stats initially show that Clig1 gets its traffic from Facebook and that Clig2 gets its traffic from twitter.

BUT: What happens when we start seeing Clig1 getting traffic from twitter? It basically means that someone reading your Facebook profile shared the same link on twitter. This sharing is a very important event in tracking how viral links are and because we know where we seeded Clig1 we know exactly what happened. We can go look for the first twitter statuses that mention Clig1 and we track the spreading of the link. The reverse spread (from twitter outwards) can be tracked for Clig2.

To rephrase this: because we know where the cligs were first shared, we can track their movement throughout the social media world. This helps us add more information to our analysis, and that’s why we need a clig for each initial seeding share, one for each social media account.