ClickTale Blog

“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.

“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.”

“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.

“Knowing how a user interacts with your website can be of enormous value!”

- T. Hambach, Founder
http://www.rotatingsignature.com/

A Google search for web analytics services brought T. Hambach to ClickTale.  While he has tried a number of other web analytics packages, he credits ClickTale with having isolated the quirks that would give his websites added functionality.

Hambach uses ClickTale on two of his sites — rotatingsignature.com, a service that offers forum users a means of randomly changing their signature every time they post, and babehq.net, an adult-content site. The two sites host a combined 1,450 visitors per day.  Through using the playback function over the period of a couple of months, Hambach began to understand his users and their needs in a different way. He reoriented his sites to reflect the way that users tend to navigate through them, which resulted in an increased number of pages visited.  “Knowing how a user interacts with your website can be of enormous value!” he enthuses.

Friends of Hambach have already signed up for ClickTale, based on his recommendation. He even recommended it to his employer, who has begun to use it too.

“I think every website should use ClickTale to improve usability and user experience. I already recommended this service to all of my colleagues!”

- Yuval Barkai, CEO
http://www.houseofseats.com/

HouseofSeats.com is a large web-based ticketing operation for sport, concert, and theatre tickets. They deliver tickets with a secure and easy purchase experience. Yuval Barkai, CEO of HouseofSeats.com, joined the ClickTale closed beta on May 14, 2007 and has benefited significantly from the service.

Mr. Barkai used ClickTale to watch hundreds of visitors browse his website. He noticed that visitors browse his site in an inefficient manner; when receiving ticket results, visitors tend to scroll down and then back up to change the ticket criteria. By adding the search criteria at the bottom of the results, HouseofSeats.com was able to reduce the number of round-trips inside the page.

Visitors tend to seek multiple events for the same team during a given sport season (football, basketball, etc). The ClickTale recordings revealed that visitors were having a hard time finding all the relevant tickets, as they were unable to be sorted by team. The website layout was redesigned to reflect this consumer need. It became more intuitive and easier to use. This simple change resulted in an increased conversion of 10% of team sports ticket purchases by visitors who might have otherwise given up their intended purchase because of a difficult search experience.

The changes initiated by Mr. Barkai and aided by ClickTale improved HouseofSeat.com’s usability, increased conversion rates, and turned browsing visitors into paying customers.

“ClickTale has allowed us to build a profile of our visitors that has shown us complexities we never knew existed. They are like the Sigmund Freud of the web analytics industry.”

- Ben Kuikman, Creative Marketing Specialist
http://www.pass-port.com/

Passport Software, Inc. specializes in business accounting software and serves over 10,000 customers through a network of 250 partners worldwide. Their current site, created about four years ago, is used mostly as an information portal for their distributors and end users.  It receives between 150 to 200 hits per day.

Ben Kuikman, Creative Marketing Specialist at Passport, first read about ClickTale through a review published on TechCrunch, a web 2.0 blog. He is currently running the ClickTale service on nearly twenty of his most visited pages. He found ClickTale’s setup to be an easy and a smooth experience. Although he has only been using ClickTale for a few weeks, it has already revealed some new information about his site; Surprisingly, the pathways that visitors use to navigate his site and the depth to which they browse proved to be much greater than he’d originally thought. More importantly, ClickTale’s heatmaps have shown him that 65 - 100% of his users –an unusually high amount–  actually scroll all the way to the bottom of his longer webpages. Heatmaps, he says, also have allowed him to see what sections are the most read on the page.

Although www.pass-port.com is not a site that engages in sales, Kuikman projects financial benefits from the use of ClickTale. The data gleaned from watching visitor movies, he explains, will save the company costly decision making time with the future redesign of their site as the evidence for the changes they need to make will be quite apparent from the footage. Robin Forde, marketing manager, says that the company intends to use ClickTale on the new site as well in order to monitor its navigability and usability.

ClickTale’s advantage, according to Kuikman, that it is “a qualitative kind of analysis which you don’t really get anywhere else. It’s a different perspective to see how those pages are browsed rather than that they are just places that people showed up on.”  He is also enthused by the surprises that ClickTale’s analytics reveal about the demographics of his viewers. Jokingly, he and Robin share that the higher the screen resolution of their users, the more tech savvy they seem to be. Passport, it seems, has derived all that they had bargained for as a result of using ClickTale– and a little extra to boot!

“Thanks to ClickTale I can watch my web users, and change the content and the graphics based on their moves”

-Johnny Vaccaro, Founder
http://www.panogames.com/ 

Video gamers in the market for a new vice are in for a treat when they come across one of Panogames.com’s 3D screenshots. Instead of viewing flat images of the game, potential buyers and industry insiders can have a taste of what it feels like to actually be in it. Panogames.com partners with such well-established game publishing companies as Atari and THQ. The site also serves as a hub for promoting the latest and greatest releases in the videogame world.

Panogames concentrates all of their ClickTale recordings on their homepage. They implemented the service after a site redesign in order to understand the impact of the changes they’d made. Founder of Panogames.com, Johnny Vaccaro, sees ClickTale as a replacement to usability testing with live participants. ClickTale revealed to him that a very small percentage of his users scroll down to the bottom of his page, thus never coming in contact with certain banners– a fault that he was easily able to remedy. He also noticed that most users don’t read the reviews posted on his site, preferring to just look at the images pictures and scan the titles. While Vaccaro does not use the demographics report provided by ClickTale, he does like seeing the referrer of each of his clients and thereby takes advantage of ClickTale’s detailed reports.

Vaccaro affirms that ClickTale is an ‘advanced usability testing tool’  He would definitely recommend it to friends.