ClickTale Blog

ClickTale and Silverpop - Providing clients with incredible new insights into customer behavior

We are incredibly excited to announce our new partnership with Silverpop, a leading provider of email marketing solutions specifically tailored to the unique needs of B2C and B2B marketers. Together, we will help our customers effectively track their consumers’ online behaviour, improve the effectiveness of their campaigns and ensure the maximum ROI for the minimum effort.

This partnership comes as marketers continue to shift more of their budgets toward email marketing channels while the need for effective measurement tools continues to grow.  A recent Silverpop survey found that 4 out of 10 marketers will increase their email budgets in 2010 and a May 2009 Forrester report indicated that U.S. businesses will spend $953 million dollars on Web analytics software in the next five years.

Read the rest of this entry »

As promised, we’ve been working on the wiki night and day and have finally finished the plug-ins section! We’ve created brand new documentation for each and every one of our plugins, as well as providing the full source code and examples of use for each one.

The full list contains over 35 plugins, including some brand new ones we haven’t told you about yet. These include plugins for Yahoo! Store pages, eBay’s ProStores pages, Zend Framework pages, Ruby on Rails and a whole lot more.

We even have five great new Google products integrations, with plugins for Google AdWords, AdSense, Maps, SEO and most importantly Google Website Optimizer. This last plugin will allow you to seamlessly track and record your visitors while A/B testing your webpages, allowing for in depth testing like never before. We will be talking more about extensive A/B testing with Google Website Optimizer over the next couple of weeks.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today we’re launching the new ClickTale Wiki, a comprehensive knowledge base about all things ClickTale, written by our users, for our users. Although there are already a couple of hundred pages, we’re just getting started. In the next few days and weeks this Wiki will become the first port of call for any ClickTale questions or support issues you may have.

The Wiki will contain how-to guides for all of our features, a full troubleshooting section and a repository of all our plugins, modules and integration guides. It’s also going to be open to the general public to contribute their own content, so feel free to join in. You can write about ClickTale features, give examples of how you’ve used ClickTale, or just talk about website optimization and usability in general.

The Wiki can be found at http://wiki.clicktale.com/. You can check out brand new pages as they are created, and feel free to request a page you think should be added. Our Wiki is only going to be as useful as the community that creates and shapes it, so pull up a chair. Make yourself at home.

“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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Record everything your customers do inside your Yahoo! Store pages with our clean and simple integration

We are happy to announce that we now fully support recording visitors inside Yahoo! Stores, both in the store front and checkout pages. ClickTale subscribers can now take advantage of our Industry leading Customer Experience Analytics on the world’s most popular E-commerce platform.

Now you can watch videos of your customers’ actual browsing sessions inside your Yahoo! Store. See your site through the eyes of your customers by watching their every mouse move, click, scroll and keystroke. It’s as if you were looking over their shoulder!

Read the rest of this entry »

ClickTale and Contactology team up to deliver Post-Click Analytics within email campaigns

We are excited to announce the launch of a new partnership with Contactology, a provider of email marketing and online survey technologies. Together we will be delivering a new level of post-click analytics never before seen in the industry. This partnership represents the first time that Customer Experience Analytics based on actual subscriber behavior has been combined with email marketing technology.

This new partnership will deliver both qualitative and quantitative statistics that will help you gather in-depth, relevant information about your subscribers. ClickTale and Contactology customers will be granted an unparalleled view of their subscribers’ behavior and consumer trends, with the ability to drill down into demographic segments and even watch individual sessions.

Discover exactly which content generates the most conversions and sales, which pages get the most attention and how much time each demographic group spends engaging with your site. Any email campaign, survey or newsletter can be tagged with accurate and in-depth data such as demographic or sociographic information. This gives you the unique opportunity to accurately target subscribers from specific demographic segments for the greatest effectiveness. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s wrong with “Time on Page”?

Last week, we looked at “Time on Page”, a statistic used by most traditional web analytics to gauge user interaction within a webpage. And while we weren’t Google-bashing (really, we weren’t!), we did point out some very serious inaccuracies with Google Analytics’ method of calculating “Time on Page”.

In this post we’ll be talking about “Engagement Time”, which measures exactly how long your visitors are actually interacting with your content. We’ll be looking closely at how it works, what it tells you, and how you can ultimately use it to improve your web content, conversion rates and ROI.

“Time on Page” vs “Engagement Time”

Traditionally, “Time on Page” tells you one thing and one thing only - how long a visitor has a web page open for. However, we’ve seen from countless observations that users will often open a new tab, minimize their browser or even go off and do something else while browsing a site. All of this is normal browsing behavior, but it gives rise to one major point: “Time on Page” tells you nothing about how long your visitors actually interact with your online content!

Time on Page can change drastically, as it can be skewed by normal browsing behavior Engagement Time however, provides steady, reliable and more representative statistic

Knowing how long your visitors spend interacting with each page is vital. You need to know what content keeps your visitors interested, what keeps them busy, and what bores them. For example:

• If you have a product features page, then you want to maximize your customer’s interaction with the page, keeping them interested until they convert.
• On the other hand, if you have a signup form, you want to keep the necessary user actions to a minimum, improving usability and minimizing form abandonment.

Knowing how long the average customer really takes to convert or fill out a form is the critical first step towards tightening the funnel and increasing your conversion rates.

That’s where “Engagement Time” comes in. ClickTale can tell you how long customers actually spend reading your content, looking at your pictures, watching your videos and browsing your products. Not just how long they had a page open for, but how long that page held their attention, and whether or not they liked what they saw.
Read the rest of this entry »

Time on Page and Engagement Time™

We love Google Analytics, we always have. Just like ClickTale it’s free, easy to set up, comes with a lot of helpful tools, and is a great way to collect analytical information about your site. However, there are several things Google Analytics just can’t tell you, and in this post we’re going to talk about two of them:

1. Google Analytics cannot tell you anything about bounced visitors! These are visitors that come to your site, only look at the page they land on, and decide to leave. These are the potential customers you didn’t get, they are the lost sales, lost leads and lost profits.
2. Google Analytics gives you no information about how long your visitors actually interact with your online content. All it can see is the amount of time a page was left open, which doesn’t tell you anything about how long your visitors were actually looking at your content.

And now we’re going to tell you why…

Like most traditional web analytics services, Google Analytics records a “Time on Page”, denoting the time a visitor spends looking at each page in your website. It does this in three stages:

1. It records the time your visitor opens the first page.
2. It records the time your visitor opens the next page.
3. It subtracts these two times and calls the result “Time on Page”.

This method has been used by Google since it started it’s analytics service back in 2006, and while it is a simple way to gauge user interaction, Google Analytics’ method for calculating “Time on Page” and “Bounced Visitors” is woefully inaccurate!

Read the rest of this entry »

ClickTale Launches Real-Time Monitor

We are proud to launch the new ClickTale Real-Time Monitor, which enables you to see where visitors are coming from, and watch exactly what they are doing in Real-Time! See precisely which pages they are browsing, as well as all their mouse moves, clicks, scrolling and keystrokes. This is an industry first in web analytics, and we are proud to be able to offer it to you today, for FREE!

You can start using the Real-Time Monitor right now by logging in to your account or signing up for free!

This fantastic tool enables you to make on-the-fly decisions like never before. Perfect for usability testing and landing page optimization, our Real-Time Monitor will allow you to see right away how your users react to the changes and improvements you make to your site, without waiting hours or days for traffic analysis. We are giving you an unprecedented level of dialogue with your visitors, revolutionizing A/B testing by incorporating Real-Time data.

Click the Play button to see recorded visitor sessions.

Keep an Eye on Your Marketing Campaigns

Read the rest of this entry »