ClickTale’s Free Research Hub, Now Open!
We’ve just opened up ClickTale’s Research Hub, customized to meet all your ebusiness needs. Here, you can gain free access to our latest reference guides, whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, and much more to keep your website customer experience current and converting.
Popular content featured in our Research Hub includes:
- In-depth Industry Whitepapers
- Master Class Webinar Series
- Comprehensive Case Studies
- Expert Q&A Sessions
- And much more!
Discover unique approaches and useful insights to get ahead of your online optimization process. This includes everything from web analytics and emarketing, to usability and design.
Top 7 New Year’s Resolutions For Your Website
This past holiday season, Cyber Monday became the single top spending day in history, raking in an impressive $1.25 billion. Little by little ebusinesses are doing their homework, getting a deeper look into the online customer experience, improving site navigation, optimizing online forms, and paying attention to usability and optimal design. Round of applause, please.
Yes, yes, this is all very well and good. But, each new year triggers new web standards and design trends, and 2012 is no different.
Over the past year, ClickTale has worked with and helped an elite group of etravel heavy weights, to get ready for the influx of holiday travel visitor traffic. After gathering over 23 million visitor recordings of data during this time, we have documented, defined, and now we deliver a powerful knowledge base of actionable steps to improve your own site’s performance for 2012 in our Online Travel Best Practices Whitepaper.
Unlock Your A/B Testing with User Experience Data
Each test version during your a/b testing needs to be an accurate reflection of how users interact with your website. So, instead of going through tens of unnecessary test versions created purely from intuition, save yourself time (and frustration) by visually understanding your visitors’ online behavior.
Visual reporting of the online user experience for a/b testing is best achieved using accessible and easy to use Customer Experience Analytics tools and solutions.
ClickTale’s Guide to A/B Testing – Intuitive Testing with Behavioral Data, clearly explains what to test, how to test, and what to change on your website. Learn how to:
Learn How to Add Context to Your A/B Tests
As the lead analyst at ClickTale, I spend most of my time analyzing our website. This means that I’m constantly running A/B tests on our webpages. However, A/B tests offer no context, just a score, and this is a HUGE problem.
We both need behavioral data to understand what our visitors paid attention to, interacted with, and read on each webpage, as well as the after-effects on conversion. Website optimization can then be intelligently based on actual visitor behavior as opposed to simple speculation.
To make a long post short, I’d like to invite you to our upcoming A/B Testing Master Class.
Wednesday, November 16th at 1pm EST
To register, click HERE
Intelligent A/B Testing
In this webinar, we’ll go over exactly how to use ClickTale for A/B testing and answer all of your questions. As a bonus, all registrants will receive a free copy of our “ClickTale Guide to A/B Testing”.
How to Get Better Google Rankings from Your PPC Campaigns
Linking your PPC ad keywords to relevant landing pages visitors actually want to see is a BIG DEAL!! And Google agrees. So much so, that in the next couple weeks, Google is rewarding e-businesses for good behavior and complying with this crucial best practice.
What’s Happening?
Google’s coming out with a global new algorithm that gives more weight to landing page quality when determining your AdWords Quality Score. Therefore, a higher ranking for lower cost-per-click bids will be granted to landing pages that Google deems most relevant to a visitor’s original query.
Read More »
4 Proven Ways to Educate Online Users About Your Technology
Creating new technology and offering updated products/features is exciting for any business. After all, we techies know what we’ve got is great and ultimately easy to use, but now we are stuck with the challenge of communicating our (modest) genius to a diverse web of users. So, the question is, how do we overcome this challenge?
Introducing a New Feature or Product
As we profess over and over, all visitors are not created equal. Therefore, not only the way visitors use your site, but also the way they acknowledge and handle website changes differs as well. It is for this reason that modifications or updates made to your system/technology need to be subtly, but clearly explained. And the way you do this depends on your own visitors’ behavioral preferences.
Remember, we are all creatures of habit, and even slight positive changes can be a big deal to your users. So be patient with your visitors and they’ll be patient with you.
Learning through Example
Recently Gmail revamped their UI making their many web page components user friendly with a cleaner layout and some guiding instruction to introduce new features.
In order to help gmail users become aware of the new changes and options, they have included education tabs on new features and customizable settings.
Pull down menu education is a great way to teach about new updates, giving users the the option to have the explanation as part of their ui.
As you can see here above, the pull down designs are great for introducing new features, as they allow each individual user the option to display instructions or not. Depending on whether your visitor is a new user, a returning customer, or simply a customer who wants to learn more, the way in which they want to see and experience the UI on your website may differ.
ClickTale’s Going Coast to Coast!
ClickTale is going global over the next two months, meeting and greeting both current and potential customers at 7 major conferences, in 5 major cities, all over the world! We’d love to see you, so have a look below for our anticipated appearances!
UXI Live Conference, Israel, September 7-8
For the first leg of our global tour, ClickTale is sponsoring and attending the UX Israel Live Conference, an intensive two day lecture series, featuring valuable workshops and excellent networking opportunities amongst the top usability experts in the area. Let us know in the comments below if you’ll be there and want to set up a one on one meeting.
Shop.org Annual Summit, Boston, September 12-14th
Then we’re off to Boston, USA, where we join the Shop.org Summit at the start of September. If you have anything to do with ecommerce, this is the THE event to check out! The list of keynotes includes speakers from Facebook, Groupon, Southwest Airlines, and Forrester Research, just to name a few.
What’s more, we’re giving away FREE EXPO Hall Passes to ALL ClickTale customers AND a 10% discount off full conference passes. So if you’re interested in going, just let us know in the comments below before September 7th and we’ll be happy to hook you up 
Does Length Matter – Long or Short Pages?
Do you know what content and exactly how much content should be on your webpages? I know, tough question. You can drive traffic from any number of search engines, lead generators, campaigns etc. However, once visitors arrive to your site, engaging them and keeping them wanting more – that’s the tricky part.
Page length is one of those determining factors that can either engage your visitors or drive them away.
How do you determine the different lengths of a page?
Short Pages = All content is generally located above the fold.
Medium Sized Pages = Need to scroll down below the fold 2-3 times using the scroll wheel on your mouse to see all content.
Long Pages = Need to scroll down below the fold 3+ times using the scroll wheel on your mouse to see all content.
Google’s Rule and Facebook’s Empire; Survival of the Fittest UX Design
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.
2 Easy Ways to Increase Visitor Engagement Times
Let’s face it; a lot of the content we need to write for our business agenda and marketing campaigns can get boring. It often needs organization and a bit of a pick-me-up to encourage readers to continue reading. During our May Marketing Madness Series, we ran Attention Heatmaps and watched hundreds of Visitor Recordings, just to keep track of exactly what content was engaging visitors. Here is what worked for us to increase visitor engagement times that can work for you too.
Bold, Bulleted Content
I know it’s true. We are always pointing out how bold wording and organized bullet points (as well as images below) can make your written content that much more engaging for users. But now we’ve got the ultimate proof.
What is interesting about the heatmap here below? Most of the attention time is actually not above the fold, but below. There is now no doubt that visitors were really concentrating on the content and drawn to the bold words and bulleted content in this section of the page.
Todd Follansbee's article on The Brain's View of a Website...readers of the blog mainly focus their highest attention times on the middle of the article, even below the fold. Long Engagement Times are mostly on bulleted content and bolded text.
Another interesting discovery. Readers of the attention heatmap below did focus most of their attention at the top and gradually engaged less with the lower sections UNTIL towards the end of the post, when they again heavily engaged with bold, bulleted content.
