Do you know how to translate all the extreme color of heat maps into powerful money making action during your website optimizations? These explosions of color narrate visitor usage patterns on your site to help you achieve the highest ROI with your a/b testing and webpage redesigns. BUT, you have to know what to look for.

Some Like It Hot

When a webpage receives abundant red hot attention from visitors, simply put, visitors want and are encouraged to interact with that particular element or section of the page, whether you intended them to or not. Therefore, it is important to know if certain red areas of high engagement are actually helping or hurting your conversion process.

Fact: For many ebusinesses, red hot sections on heat maps are NOT responsible for increasing website conversion, rather increasing website abandonment.

What should you do?

Read More »

As a good Englishman, it goes without saying that however busy I am, my day stops at 5pm for a cup of tea (with milk of course) and a crumpet. So you can only imagine my excitement when one afternoon, fully revitalized after sipping on Earl Grey’s finest, I came across Tealium one of the world’s leading tag management tools.

After one or two conversations with Ali Behnam, co-founder at Tealium, we were in business and are excited to announce that Tealium have now added ClickTale to the 120 other products offered through their service.

The new ClickTale integration allows users of Tealium’s Tag Management to add ClickTale to their site within minutes, and start watching recordings of their visitors’ browsing sessions immediately. This can all be done without any Javascript knowledge or bothering your IT team.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

Today, we are announcing our partnership with Kampyle, the leading Feedback Solution provider!

By joining Kampyle and ClickTale together, e-marketers and site owners alike are now able to get to the core of usability stumbling blocks by tracking the online behavior of feedback providers on their website.

How the Integration Works

Customers using this integration are now able to identify relevant visitor sessions based on customer satisfaction data, and choose to watch only satisfied or dissatisfied visitors. Once a specific visitor has provided feedback with Kampyle, the website owner can simply playback the recordings of his or her full browsing session with ClickTale to understand the visitor’s experience and discover the underlying reasons behind the feedback issues raised.

We are proud to offer our customers a new level of business intelligence, said Ariel Finkelstein, CEO and Co-Founder of Kampyle. Locating users’ pain points is paramount in achieving and maintaining a successful online business. Our customers can now identify shortcomings of their website in greater detail, enabling them to find an effective solution faster.”

What You Gain

This integration gives ClickTale customers the ability to use all Customer Experience Analytics features and tools, including Visitor Recordings, Heatmap Suite, Dynamic Conversion Funnels and Form Analytics, together with the Kampyle Feedback solution. By watching and following the mouse moves clicks and scrolls of feedback providers, you are able to understand:

• What obstacles prevent your visitors from being satisfied users of your website?

• What happens before your visitors abandoned their shopping carts?

• Where does your sales funnel become too confusing?

• What are missing functionalities on your site?

You will be able to act on feedback more efficiently by examining the underlying reasons behind the feedback given. Discover what interests them on your site, what they don’t like and what they want to see improved.

“This is a mission-critical tool for our customers to increase the value of every dollar spent optimizing interactions with site visitors,” said Dr. Tal Schwartz, CEO and Co-Founder of ClickTale. “We are bringing together the best of web analytics and customer feedback to drive a more integrated approach to optimizing a website’s business performance.”

The joint solution is easy to implement and is available immediately upon request.

About Kampyle

Kampyle enables businesses to optimize their websites, generate leads and significantly increase their sales. Kampyle’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution collects visitor feedback, captures real contact details, and delivers this data to sales and marketing teams. Since 2008 Kampyle has enabled over 45,000 companies to gain insight into user behavior, enhance product and service offerings, and convert up to 45% of the visitors who leave contact information. Kampyle has processed more than 12 million feedback forms in over 60 languages in 191 countries. For more information, please visit www.kampyle.com.

Profiling and drilling down your SEO and SEM traffic will save you the guessing games.

Profiling your SEO and SEM traffic is important. Okay, that’s an understatement. It’s an online business MUST, revealing money making info as to how you should be allocating your time, maximizing your marketing costs, and optimizing your webpage design.

Just in case, definition of online profiling = collecting data about your online visitors’ preferences and interests with the purpose of designing targeted landing pages and website content for specific visitor types.

What You Already Know

Using Traditional Analytics, such as Google Webmaster tools, this is probably what you already know:

1. Traffic source
2. Which keywords in both your SEO and SEM campaigns succeed in driving visitors to your site.
3. Which website landing pages visitors arrive to.

This is great, but as you’ll probably agree, not enough.

What You Still Need To Find Out

This is what you still probably don’t know and should:

1. What webpage elements visitors engage with once they arrive to your webpage.
2. How much time was spent actually engaging with a single page on your site.
3. What are the micro conversions that ensue that encourage your overall conversion rate.

In a nutshell, the customer experience of your visitors inside your webpages is what you need to know. And you REALLY need to get in there to find out!

A Little SEO, SEM, & SMM Background

At the start of SEOand SEM around 1998, online businesses simply needed to dip their feet and get exposure with these new marketing channels. The goal was to initiate link building for SEO and put out some PPC ads to see which ones provided good bait for potential customers.

Read More »

Wow! What a mad marketing month…31 articles in 31 days!

We hope you’ve all gained useful insight into improving your online businesses and, of course, enjoyed reading our posts as much as we enjoyed writing them.

I would like to offer a special thank you to our wonderful guest bloggers, including:

Although the madness may be over, ClickTale is going non-stop! Be sure to stay tuned for more articles to help you improve your online business.

Have a great summer,

Dr. Tal Schwartz
CEO & Co-founder of ClickTale

Dr. Tal Schwartz is Chairman and CEO of ClickTale. He founded ClickTale with Arik Yavilevich in 2006 with the vision of making the web a better place by revolutionizing web analytics and providing deep insights into customer behavior. Throughout his career, Tal has also been committed to using technology to produce positive social change. Tal holds bachelors degrees in Engineering and Applied Science and in Economics from the California Institute of Technology and a Doctorate in Finance from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

May Marketing Madness Usability Week, Post #31

By, Todd Follansbee
President, Web Marketing Resources

Understanding how the brain works helps in building a great web user experience.

Distracting, no? Your brain doesn't like it when things don't appear as they should.

One of our goals as user eXperience (UX) consultants is to make it easy for visitors’ brains to form “mental models” of a website. Put another way, we understand that the brain is trying to predict how a site will behave and if we fail to meet those expectations, confusion results.

The brain can only hold 7 + 2 random pieces of information in short-term memory at one time. Yet, it has an incredible ability to process volumes of information if it can fit it into a pattern. The brain’s skill at finding patterns also makes it excellent at recognizing when something is outside the norm.

For example, something simple like a piece of spinach on a friends tooth can be so distracting that we often must concentrate hard to hear what they are saying over the “noise” our brains are making about the spinach.

Simply put, the brain doesn’t like things that don’t fit right. More accurately, it doesn’t like things that don’t fit the way it expects them to fit.

One basic example of why pattern recognition matters

When a visitor lands on your homepage, his brain is looking for clues to patterns it recognizes. Often the first thing to look for is a hyperlink, the basic key to web information. If hyperlinks aren’t obvious or don’t consistently fit a recognized pattern because one is blue and another is green, flags go up. The brain keeps trying to make sense but when things are too random, the visitor is soon too distracted to focus on content.

Read More »

May Marketing Madness Usability Week, Post #30

By Conversion Rate Experts

Turning visitors into customers can be hard. It’s even harder if you don’t know exactly what they want or how to convince them to take action.

In this article, we’ve listed nine common reasons why visitors don’t convert and some tools to help you find out why.

Reason 1: You’re Ignoring The Mud Tracks on Your Website

For a long time, visitors to New York’s Central Park were taking shortcuts across the grassy areas, leaving ugly, well-worn mud tracks across them. The park’s planners took an unusual decision: instead of trying to prevent people from taking these routes, they encouraged them to do so by paving them. The planners acknowledged that the routes revealed the ideal placement of the tracks. These dirt tracks were an example of what designers called desire paths. Desire paths are clues as to how users would like to behave.

For Central Park’s planners, it was easy to see the desire paths’ grass turns brown when walked upon. However, many of the desire paths on your website can only be seen using technology. Here are some tools for making them visible:

Tools

• You can use 4Q to find out why visitors failed to convert

• By installing Kampyle or Opinion Lab onto your site, you can gather feedback from customers, so you can hear their suggestions.

• ClickTale’s Mouse Click Heatmaps can be used to identify if users are clicking on unclickable images

Read More »