Guest Article by Billy Attar

Professional blogging is an integral part of many businesses’ marketing agendas. Successful blogs can bring visitors to your site, spark interest in your products, and attract a larger fan base. However, as seen with many of our own ClickTale clients, getting good readership to your blog is often not a reflection of the quality or quantity of content you are creating – it is a function of the way the blog is presented.

By using website heatmaps generated by an In-Page Analytics tool, such as ClickTale, you can easily evaluate your visitors’ engagement with your content and improve the effectiveness of your blog design. Mouse Move and Mouse Click Heatmaps reveal where on the page your visitors move, hover, and click their mouse. Attention Heatmaps can tell you how long they spend on each section of your content. Scroll-Reach Heatmaps show you how far down the page visitors are willing to scroll.

Use Mouse Move Heatmaps to see how visitors are interacting with your content.

If after evaluating your website Heatmaps, you find that your visitors are not interacting with your blog as expected, do not be discouraged, as even minor fixes can have a major impact on your readership!
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Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer and internet icon, had no trouble amassing an impressive $24.5 billion in annual revenue just last year. However, navigating “the Amazon” can still be quite a feat. While Amazon visitors are indeed converting, it would be extremely advantageous to know how and why. In this post, we run through the potential “ah ha” moments Amazon might experience if they were to use the ClickTale solution.

How far down the page are Amazon visitors scrolling?

Scroll-Reach and Attention Heatmaps

Amazon’s product pages are largely characterized by their lengthy and varied content, and depend largely on visitors’ capacity to scroll. However, it is never wise to make assumptions regarding your visitors’ scrolling behavior. Different webpage elements motivate visitors to either scroll down farther on a webpage or stay above the fold. A Scroll-Reach Heatmap can visually show just how far down Amazon visitors are actually willing to scroll. The Attention Heatmaps can reveal exactly how much attention specific webpage content gets from Amazon visitors, what they read and what they skip over. Read More »

Global usability testing is a vital business process for any website looking to market to an international community of internet users. If the web design and content of a website are not sensitive to the lingual and cultural subtleties of a global audience, its mass appeal and ability to sell internationally becomes limited. After a recent  usability study concluded the strong correlation between cultural trends and web design, we decided to use our own ClickTale website heat maps from our In-Page Analytics Suite to substantiate the results of the study.

The Results

The usability study deduced that high-context cultures, such as Japan, China and Korea, where communication is indirect and abundant in gestures, boasted homepages containing more graphic elements and indirect messages. In contrast, low-context cultures such as Germany, Norway and the US, where communication is more direct, featured more static homepages displaying direct messages.

Interestingly enough, using the same user groups as stipulated by the study, with website heat maps ClickTale identified the identical online behavioral patterns within our own webpages.

Both the study and ClickTale’s experiment confirm how global usability testing enables online businesses to optimize their site according to the browsing behavior of international user groups.

The Experiment

We used ClickTale Segmented Heatmaps of our webpages to compare the online behavior of the two user groups as defined by the study.

We first generated a Segmented Heatmap of our Product Tour Page, segmenting by first time visitors from the US, Germany, and Norway, ie, low-context cultures.

High-Context Vs. Low-context

High-context cultures, China, Japan, and Korea vs. Low-context cultures US, Germany, and Norway

We then compared this Heatmap to one segmenting by first time visitors from China, Japan and Korea to the same ClickTale Product Tour page, i.e. high-context cultures. Read More »

Usability studies have been and continue to be a key method for testing and optimizing website usability.  Both laboratory eye tracking and remote mouse tracking studies offer businesses accurate and actionable results. Eye tracking, as used by top enterprises such as Google, uses cameras and specialist software to track where the eyes of internet users land on a webpage. Mouse tracking analytics follows the mouse movements of an internet user to simulate eye movement on a webpage.  Over the last few years, mouse tracking has greatly matured, developing features and achieving accuracy that make it a credible alternative to eye tracking.

Heatmaps created using traditional eye tracking (left) and mouse tracking (right)

Research has shown that when both methods of testing are conducted simultaneously, there is an 84%-88% correlation in the results¹. In addition, both the eye and mouse move to relatively the same rhythm and focus in on the same page content². Both eye and mouse tracking analytics deliver valuable information about how your visitors are engaging with your website. This is vital to work out what changes you need to make in order to benefit your visitors’ experience and your ROI.

Example of the mouse following the eye in the vertical direction on a Google search page, plotting the Y coordinate against time. ©Google, 2008

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We’re raising the bar, again.

Today, ClickTale is launching two new heatmap analytics, which are set to revolutionize the way the industry looks at both heatmaps and visual analytics as a whole.

Our new Segmented Heatmaps give site owners the ability to filter ClickTale’s full range of visual heatmaps based on any customer information or browsing behavior. With our new Ultra Scale Heatmaps, site owners can view data from as many as 100,000 pageviews in a single graphical report, delivering accurate results at a fraction of the cost of traditional eye-tracking studies.

“The biggest challenge many site owners face is measuring visitor engagement and site usability on a realistic and affordable scale,” said Dr. Tal Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of ClickTale. “These new heatmap analytics features reveal unprecedented detail about visitor behavior patterns that can be used to make on-the-fly website changes that improve site usability and conversion rates.”

We can see what new visitors look at on our homepage (left), as opposed to existing customers (right)

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“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 favourite website heat map.

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 website heat map:

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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Win up to $250 to spend at the Apple store!

We’ve had a great 2009! We’ve launched some incredible products and helped tens of thousands of businesses optimize their websites. So we wanted to give something back to you, our subscribers. And what better way to do that than by giving away loads of free stuff to make sure your year also goes out with a bang!

Today we are announcing our 2009 Holiday Contest and giving away a whole stack of vouchers to spend in the Apple or iTunes* store. First prize is a whopping $250 voucher which would get you any of these:

Second prize is a $100 voucher, third prize is a $50 voucher, and we’ll also be giving away five runner-up prizes of $10 vouchers to noteworthy entries.

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“The definitive method for conducting accurate eye-tracking on a massive scale at a fraction of the cost”

Today, ClickTale is launching its new Mouse Move Heatmap, which is set to revolutionize the fields of Customer Experience Analytics and website usability. By aggregating the mouse movements of hundreds visitors on a site, we create a comprehensive, visual representation of what visitors are looking at and focusing on within the page. Instead of testing a handful of users for thousands of dollars, you can test thousands of users for a fraction of a dollar each!

The Mouse Move Heatmap on our Features page shows us exactly what content our visitors look at

Until now, Eye-tracking studies were the preferred choice in web usability testing. They allow website owners to know exactly how people use their sites, where they look, what grabs their attention and what they focus on. However the price of this technology is extremely prohibitive, costing tens of thousands of dollars for a single study. It has therefore only been accessible to the biggest web companies, and has been used by Google, Yahoo! and eBay.

Independent research shows that there is an 84% to 88% correlation between mouse and eye movements*, allowing us to create high-precision heatmaps based on just the users’ mouse movements. In addition, our heatmaps don’t require the subjects to wear a special headset or use special equipment. Indeed, most visitors aren’t even aware they’re being recorded, allowing for a completely transparent and anonymous usability testing process.

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