ClickTale Blog

“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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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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Today, we are proud to launch the third addition to our groundbreaking suite of FREE heatmaps, which is sure to knock your socks off:

Introducing Mouse Click Heatmaps

The first-ever click heatmap that is interactive and seamlessly integrated with ClickTale’s Link Analytics^TM. Now you can see everywhere your visitors’ click, even where they are not supposed to, along with innovative statistics on all link interactions.

The new Mouse Click Heatmap joins the innovative suite of ClickTale Scrolling Heatmaps, including the Scroll-reach Heatmap ^TM, which shows how far down the page visitors scroll, and the Attention Heatmap^TM, which reveals where and for how long visitors are focusing their attention.

There are several ways that you can use our new Mouse Click Heatmaps to help improve your websites and landing pages:

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“Clicktale removes guesswork from e-commerce analytics!”

- Nik A. Severinov, Project Manager
http://www.fugees.ru/

As a rapidly growing start-up with an eye for the next big thing on the Russian market, fugees.ru has come a long way since its inception in June, 2007. Currently, fugees.ru is a locus for selling freelance e-books and attracting research participants, with several more projects on the horizon. One such project is a virtual world based on Flash technology. According to Nik Severinov, project manager, the site averages about 50 hits per workday, and about 15 on weekends. The 3-person management team uses a wide variety of subcontractors to develop each of their products.

Improvement to the relatively new site has already been noted by Severinov. It was his visitors, in fact, who thanked him for the increased usability that he was able to provide because of ClickTale’s services. Severinov ranks his use of ClickTale’s functions in the following order of importance: Recordings, heatmaps, basic demographics, and screen and windows sizes. While he uses other analytics packages in his native language, he credits only ClickTale for helping him ‘get to know’ his users through the services listed above. It is perhaps due to these improvements that he would heartily endorse ClickTale to friends and co-workers.

Severinov originally read about ClickTale on a SitePoint.com review. Since becoming a subscriber, he has made several keen observations regarding ClickTale’s services and functionality. Always open to helpful feedback, the ClickTale team has developed a friendly relationship with him and has come to regard Severinov and fugees.ru as a valuable client.

“Our business is all about taking care of our customers.  ClickTale has played a pivotal role in allowing us to do that better on our website.”

- Toby Hemmerling, Co-Founder and CEO
http://www.theorganicdish.com/

The Organic Dish is a unique service local to Boulder, CO. The company sells “dinner kits” or frozen organic meals that clients can cook and serve in their home within minutes. They also host cooking sessions wherein patrons may prepare their own meals from pre-cut, cleaned organic ingredients. This service may also be turned into a social event for ten or more adults. On their website, http://www.theorganicdish.com/, meals may be ordered from a menu and purchased. The site is also a great source of information about the way the business works. The business, launched in April of 2007, currently gets about 80 unique visitors per day. The average purchase made is about $150.

Toby Hemmerling, one of the co-founders of the operation, wears many hats, including that of CEO. He is very pleased with the services that ClickTale provides, especially being able to track his users’ paths through the website. He noticed immediately through the recordings and heatmaps that users had to do a lot of hunting before they could find the dinner menu– one of the primary reasons for visiting the site and also the route to the checkout page. Heatmaps also proved that most of his visitors were scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page to get to the info they needed. So Toby rearranged the navigational menu and contents based on his clients’ flow through the website. That way, he preserved the attention of those clients who were not as likely to hunt all the way to the bottom of the page to find what they were looking for.

Toby remembers originally reading about ClickTale’s free service on a blog, and thought it would be worth a try. “You hear a lot of people say that user testing is too complicated and expensive”, he says “but [ClickTale's] recording really provides about 80% of what you get out of live user testing anyway.” Toby is looking forward to becoming a premium subscriber so that he may take advantage of being able to track users on secure pages.

It’s taken a year of hard work and studies — not to mention planning, fixing, monitoring, and improving– and the big day has finally come.
We couldn’t be prouder!

Graduating from a Beta and launching the service publicly is no small task, but we think we’ve done it with flying colors. We invite you to come and check out the accomplishments for yourself. The new ClickTale provides instantaneous signup with no need for an invitation. But that’s not all…

As ClickTale finally ventures out into the real world, we know you’ll be impressed by our new generation of heatmaps. In addition to “movie playback” and Scrolling heatmaps that ClickTale has always offered, today’s launch includes Heatmaps with Link Analytics.

 
Fig. 1: Heatmap showing an Advanced Details Pane over an Image Link

Link Analytics gives you an even more detailed analysis of your visitor’s interactions with your website; information not available anywhere else. Knowing the number of clicks each link generates is important, but combining that with how many people hovered over that link and you’re talking abut a serious degree of data. Still, it doesn’t end there. Link Analytics reports how many of those hovers eventually turn into clicks, how much time it took for a user to decide on a link, and more. Here are some of the new metrics you’ll have access to:

• Clicks, we count the number of clicks and the percent of the total clicks on every link.
• Visitors who Clicked are the number of unique visitors who clicked on a link as well as the fraction of total visitors.
• Hovers over Links, the number of mouse hovers over a link. This tells how attractive a link is to the visitor, but not necessarily attractive enough for a click.
• Hovers to Clicks, is the portion of mouse hovers that eventually convert into mouse clicks.
• Hesitation is the average time from beginning of a mouse hover to the moment of the mouse click.
• Hover Time is the average time mouse hovers over a link, indicating visitor interest level.
• Time to Click is the average time between the moment a page has been loaded to the moment a link is clicked. You can now discover which links are most attractive by seeing the average time it takes to click on them.
• Hover Order ranks the links by the average order in which they were hovered-over by visitors. Shows which links attract the mouse first, second and so on.    

Fig. 2: Heatmap showing an Advanced Details Pane over a Text Link

Subscribers have been raving about the new heatmaps. Christine Kayser, Marketing Analytics Coordinator at Lycos says “I love the new changes. Knowing how many hovered vs. how many clicked is excellent. Plus, being able to see items that are clickable that people aren’t clicking on is extremely helpful for our design team. The “Time to Click” data is fascinating.”

Jeff Pittelkow, Direct Marketing Specialist at Horizon Hobby says “The new heat map features are great! It gives us all the great information we need to accurately and wisely make decisions about our site. I think the hesitation feature is quite unique too. Also the hover, and hovers to clicks. I can’t think of anywhere you can actually see how many people hovered on a link and decided not to click on it; or for that matter, how long it took someone to click on it.”

Fig. 3: The Heatmap in Simple Mode

We’re offering a variety of pricing plans, the basic one– consisting of 100 recordings per week– continues to be free of charge.  Other plans offer increased recordings and advanced features such as e-mail support, advanced search capabilities, a longer recording history, SSL encryption, and the ability to record HTTPS pages.

We’re sure that you’re going to want to put the new ClickTale to work right away. In the meantime, we’re taking this commencement ceremony seriously: we’re already working on the next batch of features and improvements to offer you.

“ClickTale has allowed us to build a profile of our visitors that has shown us complexities we never knew existed. They are like the Sigmund Freud of the web analytics industry.”

- Ben Kuikman, Creative Marketing Specialist
http://www.pass-port.com/

Passport Software, Inc. specializes in business accounting software and serves over 10,000 customers through a network of 250 partners worldwide. Their current site, created about four years ago, is used mostly as an information portal for their distributors and end users.  It receives between 150 to 200 hits per day.

Ben Kuikman, Creative Marketing Specialist at Passport, first read about ClickTale through a review published on TechCrunch, a web 2.0 blog. He is currently running the ClickTale service on nearly twenty of his most visited pages. He found ClickTale’s setup to be an easy and a smooth experience. Although he has only been using ClickTale for a few weeks, it has already revealed some new information about his site; Surprisingly, the pathways that visitors use to navigate his site and the depth to which they browse proved to be much greater than he’d originally thought. More importantly, ClickTale’s heatmaps have shown him that 65 - 100% of his users –an unusually high amount–  actually scroll all the way to the bottom of his longer webpages. Heatmaps, he says, also have allowed him to see what sections are the most read on the page.

Although www.pass-port.com is not a site that engages in sales, Kuikman projects financial benefits from the use of ClickTale. The data gleaned from watching visitor movies, he explains, will save the company costly decision making time with the future redesign of their site as the evidence for the changes they need to make will be quite apparent from the footage. Robin Forde, marketing manager, says that the company intends to use ClickTale on the new site as well in order to monitor its navigability and usability.

ClickTale’s advantage, according to Kuikman, that it is “a qualitative kind of analysis which you don’t really get anywhere else. It’s a different perspective to see how those pages are browsed rather than that they are just places that people showed up on.”  He is also enthused by the surprises that ClickTale’s analytics reveal about the demographics of his viewers. Jokingly, he and Robin share that the higher the screen resolution of their users, the more tech savvy they seem to be. Passport, it seems, has derived all that they had bargained for as a result of using ClickTale– and a little extra to boot!