The online super giants, leaders of their own respective industries weren’t always on top. Before Google, there was Yahoo. Back in 2006, before Facebook conquered the online world with its current 750 million users, Myspace was the social network leader. So, why the sudden transfer of power? How did Google overtake Yahoo and Facebook persevere over MySpace?

Answer: UX Design. Here we take a closer look at the design history of these social network powerhouses and their effect on web user engagement.

Google's Logo Evolution

Google’s Rule

Google understands what its users want: a place to search, that’s it. They have, therefore, structured their design accordingly. Google personalizes their site by:

• Clean, structured, and simple layout.
• Fun colorful logo. This not only makes Google’s page stand out, but also makes it a brand to remember. Highlighting and emphasizing the most important aspects of your site can work in your favor.

• Search box location smack in the middle of the page. It may not have much but it’s aesthetically pleasing to look at and is the focal point of page, where the mouse cursor is automatically set to start typing.

Have a look at some of Google Webmaster, Dennis Hwang’s popular doodles that have given the search giant its fun and creative reputation.

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About

Freestyle Accounting is an industry leading firm of contractor accountants providing accountancy and tax planning service to UK contractors, freelancers and consultants. Their comprehensive limited company accountancy service includes everything a contractor needs from initial company formation, business bank account setup and PAYE/ VAT registration, right through to quarterly VAT returns and annual accounts preparation, personal tax return, professional indemnity insurance, plus unlimited IR35 contract reviews and tax advice. The service is offered to contractors and freelancers throughout the United Kingdom, with offices based in Coventry and London.

Objective of Website

The main objective of the Freestyle Accounting website is to provide information on the company’s services and to persuade visitors to engage by completing their online enquiry form used as leads for its sales team.

Challenge

Freestyle Accounting was using Google Website Optimizer to run split usability testing on its webpages. However, it was still not able to explain why visitors were abandoning its homepage or failing to complete the enquiry form. It needed to understand what visitors were doing inside the webpages.

Solution

Freestyle decided to use ClickTale to discover why a large number of visitors were abandoning its homepage and its form conversion funnel.

These are the tools Freestyle used and what it discovered using each one.

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May Marketing Madness Conversion Week, Post #6

Happy customers with positive buzz to share about your business are incredible resources! This is especially true when trying to appeal to a particular vertical of clients. Of course getting your business mentioned or featured in the Wall Street Journal is nothing short of amazing, but what your own customers have to say about your products and services can turn out to be just as powerful, if not more so.

According to TechCrunch, customer review technology is gaining heavy popularity (and $10 million in financial backing!) as more and more online businesses are realizing their tremendous influence on consumer sales.

Customer Testimonials/Reviews

To get the business you deserve, you often have to put up a tough fight to compete with a crowded market of competitors. Just as a recommendation letter can go a long way for a college applicant or a job candidate, so too can a company testimonial. It never hurts to go for that extra seal of approval. It’s certainly worked wonders for a little online shop you may be familiar with called Amazon.com

Case Studies

Case studies, another form of customer testimonials, are like descriptive report cards about your business, highlighting the key facts and figures you were able to achieve for a customer. Whether it is a conversion, revenue, or traffic flow increase customers were able to achieve as a result of your services, share their numbers, publish their progress, and wow your potential clients.
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A Case Study With Digital Results

The “results” are in…digital marketing agency, Digital Results, sees a 600% increase in form conversion after using the ClickTale solution!

“ClickTale actually prompted us to re-design our ENTIRE website!”
ClickTale recently had the pleasure of interviewing Russell Bishop, Web Designer at Digital Results Marketing Agency. He shared with us his website’s positive experience and impressive improvements since using the ClickTale solution. We were very excited to learn about his ClickTale story.

CT: So Russell, tell us a bit about your site.
DR: Digital Results is a full service digital marketing agency that specializes in web design. Our experienced and talented team of specialists creates innovative new websites and web apps for primarily B2B companies.

Digital Results homepage

CT: How much daily traffic does your site receive?
DR: On average, our website receives just under 3000 unique visitors a month (90 a day), depending on the activity on our blog. Read More »

Cyber-Duck helped OptimaSystems get incredible results in just 10 days!

Optima Systems is the UK’s leading office partitioning specialist, offering quality service and innovative design. They approached Cyber-Duck.co.uk, an award-winning London based digital agency, and asked them to help improve their conversion rates. They expected great results, but even they were amazed at the improvements!

“ClickTale was the obvious tool for the job,” said Lefteris Grammatas from Cyber-Duck “I am an active member on the Web Analytics Association and I follow many analytics mailing lists, groups and analytics experts’ blogs. We often use Google Analytics with ClickTale as they complement each other perfectly.”

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Today, we’re announcing the launch of the ClickTale Customer Showcase, giving you the chance to share your designs and experiences with tens of thousands of ClickTale customers. Our customer base and user community has grown at an incredible rate over the last year, and we wanted to launch a project that will give something back to its members.

You can send us any discoveries you’ve made using ClickTale, learn from the others’ experiences, and see how ClickTale has been used by websites great and small all over the globe. All Showcase projects will appear on our corporate blog and each month the best projects will be included in our monthly newsletter that goes out to over 40,000 subscribers.

By sharing your projects with us you’ll get some great buzz for your site, as well as helping out our ever growing community. There are no strict requirements or qualifications, any experiences you have had with ClickTale that will benefit the community would be great. It’s a wonderful way to get your designs out there for some constructive comments, positive feedback and free word of mouth marketing!

If you’re interested in having your webpage featured in our upcoming showcase, please send a nice email to showcase@clicktale.com.

“ClickTale Rocks! The ability to gain perspective from so many angles of user interaction within our website has given us a definite edge over our competition”

- Phillip Lakin, VP of Operations, EduLocator.com

EduLocator Corp is an Online educational search engine, directory and reference website for current and potential students. The service focuses on giving students the best possible information about the educational landscape, informing them about pay-scale and job pathways, as well as several financing options such as Canada’s Second Career program.

This Mouse Move Heatmap of Edulocator's homepage shows what visitors are looking at!

Phillip Lakin, VP of Operations, started using ClickTale on the site 8 months ago “This was the first time we came across a service that would allow us to watch videos of our visitors’ mouse moves. When you work with the same landing page for a long time you become very used to it, and forget how to approach it as a first-time user. ClickTale gave us invaluable insights into our user’s actual behavior on our site.”

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For those of you who haven’t visited ClickTale.com in a while, now’s a great time to try it out, as we’ve completely overhauled our entire site. We’ve cleaned out and freshened up everything, from our homepage design and demo movie to the site navigation and a new product tour.

Simply put, we’ve gone from this:

To this:

We’ve added a new resource section to our homepage, with links to video testimonials, our new wiki and Quick Start Guide. The live chat button in the top corner of every page of our site will let you get an instant response from one of our product specialists. We’ve also created an extensive product tour with a full page detailing each one of our main features.

What’s more, we’re taking this opportunity to put our money where our mouth is. Over the next few weeks and months we’re going to be using our own site as the ultimate ClickTale case study. We’ll be documenting all the changes we make to our site here on our blog, and invite you to watch our process of site optimization every step of the way.

But for now we wanted to give you a taste of what’s to come. So to start off, here is a mouse move heatmap of the upper part of our old site.

As you can see, most returning visitors went to the “Sign in” button, but new visitors did not really use the navigational menu, and our “Special Offer” call-to-action button got little or no attention. Now let’s compare that to a heatmap of our new site.

Even after just 24 hours, the difference is clear! While we still see a lot of visitors going to the “Sign in” button, new visitors now use the navigation bar to get around our site. This gets people to where they want to go faster and is a great sign of site usability. In addition, our two new call-to-action buttons, “Play Video” and “Plans & Pricing” get a lot more healthy attention.

We’ll be posting every few weeks as our new site evolves, showing you exactly how we’re optimizing our site and improving its usability and conversion rate. You can do the same by signing up for a free account now and learn how to optimize your own website based on your customers’ actual browsing behavior.

We’ve had an incredible amount of heatmaps sent to us over the last two weeks, and the quality of the entries this year has been exceptional. With such a wide range to choose from, it was really hard to pick the winners, but after much deliberation we were able to choose our favourites.

We’ve asked a few of our conversion analysts, who usually work with our enterprise clients, to give us their opinions. You can see their comments below, showing how the layout and design of these sites can be further improved to boost conversion rates.

Click on the images below to see the full heatmaps:

First Prize – Michael Kjeldsen, Bartendermagasinet.dk

“I’ve managed to raise conversions on my site by nearly 300%. Which is gooooood ”

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Within 24 hours of using ClickTale’s new Search I was able to find and fix some major flaws in my checkout process. This service alone is worth every penny of the subscription price!” – T. Jacobson, Founder, FreeSocialStuff.com

Today we are proud to officially launch our new Search and Alerts. These incredibly powerful tools allows you to define any business process, scenario or funnel and see exactly which visitors completed the process, which dropped out, and why! From e-commerce funnels and online checkouts to complicated website navigation and everything in between, any process you have can be tracked and optimized. The possibilities are literally endless!

Until now, traditional web analytics might show you where your potential customers drop out of your funnels, but now with ClickTale’s new Search and Alerts you can find out why! Instead of wading through hundreds of hours of videos, you can filter your visitors and only see the recordings of customers who match specific business scenarios. By optimizing your customer’s progress through your funnels you can guarantee better conversion rates, increased sales and see a much higher return on your investment.

These new tools are available for free, right now, to all our subscribers, and require no additional setup or installation. In this post we’ll show you how to use them, and give you some real life business scenarios that will help you improve your conversion rates.
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