Widget distribution platforms like ClearSpring, Gigya, and WidgetBox generally provide three types of benefits to widget developers, customers and marketers. These include:

• Distribution: Marketing exposure through listings in widget directories and marketplaces
• Sharing: Infrastructure for sharing widgets across social networks and communities
• Tracking and Reporting: Infrastructure for tracking widget usage, distribution and growth

Distribution is a given, sharing is dicey, but tracking is a real cost savings! Custom reporting engines can consume 20-30% of a typical wiget development project, but using tracking tools from widget distributors like ClearSpring can significantly reduce or eliminate that cost. Widgets are hard to track since many of them are developed in Flash and others reside on computer desktops so many times developers must include "analytics machinery" (as well as a report backend) to effectively track widget useage and distribution. ClearSpring, Gigya and WidgetBox can significantly simplify the problem.

ClearSpring does a pretty good job of providing an long list of tracking parameters including live traffic, audience statistics (uniques, geography and computer information), enagements (views, interactions, clicks, clickthroughs, installs, sharing) as well as custom events you can define in your own code. Gigya sports a slightly more powerful reporting engine that supports exporting data, custom reports and has a nift analytics dashboard.

Custom event tracking is especially useful when trying to understand more granular user interaction or sharing practicies.

Clients should definately consider using ClearSpring or a similar widget distribution platform for either primary or secondary tracking. The idea of secondary tracking is to either provide backup tracking or simply verify that your primary tracking is working accurately.  In the future, I will do a comparison of ClearSpring's, Gigya's and WidgetBox's reporting features and functionality to help guide your decision making.