ClickTale Blog

Award Recognizes 100 “Most Promising” Companies Driving the Future of Technology

ClickTale, a pioneer and leader in Web Interaction Analytics (WIA), announced today that Red Herring has awarded them the distinguished Red Herring 100 Europe for the company’s pioneering development of website visitor recording analytics technology. The celebrated award is given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year.

ClickTale enables anyone involved with website design and optimization to capture mouse movements and keystrokes of website visitors in action, over multiple web pages, as well as within password protected sites. The company’s online website analysis tools let subscribers replay movies showing individual surfers clicking and scrolling pages, generate heatmaps with advanced overlay statistics, and uncover significant trends such as visitor hesitation and average hover times.

“This year’s impressive list of winners demonstrates Europe’s emergence as a major player in the global technology sector,” said Red Herring Editor-in-Chief, Joel Dreyfuss. “The exceptional accomplishments of European technology companies and entrepreneurs are a testament to the rapid advancements being made in building the European innovation ecosystem.”

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ClickTale is proud to have been chosen as a finalist for the Red Herring 100 Europe award given to the top private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year.

Red Herring is “a global media company” focusing on technology from an economic vantage point. Selection of finalists was based on “financial data and subjective criteria, including quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development.”

Becoming one of the RH 100 catapults companies into a whole new level of recognition - winning companies are predicted to become leaders in the field, affecting lifestyle and industry. “ClickTale is honored to be following in the footsteps of giants such as Google, eBay, and Skype, who are past winners of the award,” said Tal Schwartz, co-founder and CEO. “This is a very exciting development for ClickTale. We are pleased to have Red Herring recognize us as trailblazers in the field of web analytics.”

Regardless of the competition’s outcome, ClickTale will not be resting on its laurels. Forging ahead, ClickTale is also announcing a mashup with MyBlogLog which enables subscribers to see not just what users do but, also, who they are based on their public profile in MyBlogLog. Many more new developments are in the works and will be released in the coming months.

About ClickTale
ClickTale (www.clicktale.com) is a web analytics service that reveals the mystery of what users actually do inside website pages and fills the gap left by traditional web analytics that only measure activity in between pages. ClickTale captures and analyzes interactions inside web pages providing insights that can significantly increase revenues and improve usability. ClickTale has helped thousands of websites minimize abandonment of shopping carts, maximize completion of online forms, optimize landing pages, and run easy to implement, inexpensive usability testing. ClickTale is a hosted service, so there is no software to install and setup takes just a few minutes.

About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company which unites the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine, an online daily technology news service, technology newsletters and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. More information about Red Herring is available on the Internet at www.redherring.com.

We are proud and excited to have won a spot on the Israel Web Tour. ClickTale was chosen as one of fifteen Israeli startups to meet with some of Silicon Valley’s top companies. These fifteen companies, selected from over 90 entrants, “will be Israel’s hottest Internet startups in 2008″ according to VC Cafe.

Google, Yahoo, Ask, Facebook, and Microsoft will be amongst the organizations that we will have a chance to network with over the four-day program, not to mention a host of prominent investors. You, in turn, can network with us at the public showcase on the Microsoft campus in Mountain View on February 6th.

The Tour is organized by the California Israel Chamber of commerce, which facilitates and supports ventures between the two communities. Watch a video of last year’s tour on youtube.

“We’ve been bombarded with numbers and graphs and sometimes it’s still guesswork. But once you’ve got a recording, you can see for yourself what’s happening.”

- Gary Hides, Co-Founder
http://castus.co.uk/

Castus.co.uk produces websites for small and medium sized companies in the north of England. As they mature, they have begun to attract larger and larger companies with broader needs and bigger budgets.

Castus uses ClickTale to determine the usability of the sites that they have created. They find that the main benefit is for usability testing without the need for expensive usability labs. “I like ClickTale better anyway,” says Gary Hides, co-founder of the company “you get more of an idea of users’ real behavior. A lab is a more contrived environment,” he explains. “On ClickTale recordings, users act more naturally.” Hides watches a few videos at a time and makes notes of corrections to recommend to his clients.

The realizations gleaned from ClickTale have been a “kick in the rear” to hasten the impending redesign of Castus’s own site. ClickTale helped castus.co.uk realize that people were clicking on images on their site that they believed to be links, but were in fact not clickable. He intends to use ClickTale to help him with a total redesign rather than a piecemeal approach.

Hides says that he has already recommended ClickTale to quite a few web designers, all of whom have signed up for the closed beta. He has demonstrated the service for designers in his office who he says were ‘wowed’ by it.

Europe’s boutique venture capital firm teams up with the pioneer in Web Interaction Analytics (WIA) as the company releases its latest insights on browsing behavior.

Tel Aviv, Israel, December 5, 2007 - ClickTale, the pioneer and leader in Web Interaction Analytics (WIA), announced today that it has secured funding from YL Ventures, a boutique European venture capital firm. ClickTale, whose innovative service enables websites to record and watch movies of their users’ browsing sessions, will use the proceeds of the funding round to expand the sales and the feature set of their hosted service.

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In part 1 of our ClickTale Scrolling Report, we learned that visitors scroll in a relative way - relative position inside the page, not based on absolute position in terms of pixels. In other words, the same number of page viewers will tend to scroll halfway or three-quarters through a page, regardless of whether the page size is 5,000 pixels or 10,000 pixels. In part 2, we reveal more new findings: Read on to learn about the way visitors pay attention to content on your site and what areas on your site receive the most attention.

See the end of this posting for ideas on how to make all this info work for you.

Are Your Visitors Paying Attention?

Have you ever wondered how much attention your visitors pay to your website content? We all have, of course. But until recently, most of the evidence has been based on personal observation or random investigations rather than systematic scientific evaluation. To answer this question objectively, we have analyzed over 80,000 web page browsing sessions collected over a one month period.

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“ClickTale increased my conversion rate by 35%!”

- Oded Jonathan, Marketing Manager
http://www.restorationsos.com/

When your basement is flooding or you kitchen is ruined by smoke, who are you going to call?  Well, if you want speedy and courteous service, you would be in the good company of about 1,500 - 2,000 other people who visit RestorationSOS.com on a daily basis. The site directs visitors to live ‘damage consultants’ available 24/7 who can guide home and business owners through the initial steps of safety procedures, damage control and get them the professional help they need immediately. The site also features educational information about preventative measures and the hazards of water, sewage, fire and mold.

Oded Jonathan, head of marketing for RestorationSOS, began noticing patterns in user behavior within his first short while as a ClickTale client. Turns out there were several changes that needed to be made, the most serious of which was concerning a link whereby visitors could submit a request.  In the ClickTale videos he watched, Oded noticed that there were many more requests made than received by his company.  After some intensive research, the problem was found to lay with the server. After he upgraded the server, there was an increased conversion of 35% more requests. “ClickTale can be priceless sometimes” Oded says.

For this reason alone, Oded is thankful to an SEO friend who gave him the scoop on ClickTale. However, the benefit he derives from the service doesn’t end there.  He watches ClickTale on an almost daily basis to see how users react to different offers, texts, and the page itself. “ClickTale will definitely expand your horizons when you come to see the behaviour of your users,” claims Oded. What ClickTale offers, he says, is more valuable than what can be found in a usability lab because there is no sense of having one’s actions analyzed.

In addition to watching videos, Oded says that he would make use of many other of ClickTale’s functions such as tags and heatmaps. Oded concludes that “ClickTale provides a vital sort of instant gratification whereby I can solve a problem within 24 hours.  I can’t think of any other tool that would do that.”

In our previous report entitled “Unfolding the Fold”, we analyzed web visitors’ scrolling behavior and determined the effect of the so-called “fold” on browsing activity.

One year later we are excited to publish much more detailed research, revealing new information and providing you with a whole new set of best practices and recommendations. This research is based on a sample of a data that was collected by the ClickTale service from thousands of websites and over 80,000 page views chosen at random between June 15th and July 15th, 2007.

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“Clicktale removes guesswork from e-commerce analytics!”

- Nik A. Severinov, Project Manager
http://www.fugees.ru/

As a rapidly growing start-up with an eye for the next big thing on the Russian market, fugees.ru has come a long way since its inception in June, 2007. Currently, fugees.ru is a locus for selling freelance e-books and attracting research participants, with several more projects on the horizon. One such project is a virtual world based on Flash technology. According to Nik Severinov, project manager, the site averages about 50 hits per workday, and about 15 on weekends. The 3-person management team uses a wide variety of subcontractors to develop each of their products.

Improvement to the relatively new site has already been noted by Severinov. It was his visitors, in fact, who thanked him for the increased usability that he was able to provide because of ClickTale’s services. Severinov ranks his use of ClickTale’s functions in the following order of importance: Recordings, heatmaps, basic demographics, and screen and windows sizes. While he uses other analytics packages in his native language, he credits only ClickTale for helping him ‘get to know’ his users through the services listed above. It is perhaps due to these improvements that he would heartily endorse ClickTale to friends and co-workers.

Severinov originally read about ClickTale on a SitePoint.com review. Since becoming a subscriber, he has made several keen observations regarding ClickTale’s services and functionality. Always open to helpful feedback, the ClickTale team has developed a friendly relationship with him and has come to regard Severinov and fugees.ru as a valuable client.

“Our business is all about taking care of our customers.  ClickTale has played a pivotal role in allowing us to do that better on our website.”

- Toby Hemmerling, Co-Founder and CEO
http://www.theorganicdish.com/

The Organic Dish is a unique service local to Boulder, CO. The company sells “dinner kits” or frozen organic meals that clients can cook and serve in their home within minutes. They also host cooking sessions wherein patrons may prepare their own meals from pre-cut, cleaned organic ingredients. This service may also be turned into a social event for ten or more adults. On their website, http://www.theorganicdish.com/, meals may be ordered from a menu and purchased. The site is also a great source of information about the way the business works. The business, launched in April of 2007, currently gets about 80 unique visitors per day. The average purchase made is about $150.

Toby Hemmerling, one of the co-founders of the operation, wears many hats, including that of CEO. He is very pleased with the services that ClickTale provides, especially being able to track his users’ paths through the website. He noticed immediately through the recordings and heatmaps that users had to do a lot of hunting before they could find the dinner menu– one of the primary reasons for visiting the site and also the route to the checkout page. Heatmaps also proved that most of his visitors were scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page to get to the info they needed. So Toby rearranged the navigational menu and contents based on his clients’ flow through the website. That way, he preserved the attention of those clients who were not as likely to hunt all the way to the bottom of the page to find what they were looking for.

Toby remembers originally reading about ClickTale’s free service on a blog, and thought it would be worth a try. “You hear a lot of people say that user testing is too complicated and expensive”, he says “but [ClickTale’s] recording really provides about 80% of what you get out of live user testing anyway.” Toby is looking forward to becoming a premium subscriber so that he may take advantage of being able to track users on secure pages.