ClickTale Blog

In part 1 of our ClickTale Scrolling Report, we learned that visitors scroll in a relative way - relative position inside the page, not based on absolute position in terms of pixels. In other words, the same number of page viewers will tend to scroll halfway or three-quarters through a page, regardless of whether the page size is 5,000 pixels or 10,000 pixels. In part 2, we reveal more new findings: Read on to learn about the way visitors pay attention to content on your site and what areas on your site receive the most attention.

See the end of this posting for ideas on how to make all this info work for you.

Are Your Visitors Paying Attention?

Have you ever wondered how much attention your visitors pay to your website content? We all have, of course. But until recently, most of the evidence has been based on personal observation or random investigations rather than systematic scientific evaluation. To answer this question objectively, we have analyzed over 80,000 web page browsing sessions collected over a one month period.

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In our previous report entitled “Unfolding the Fold”, we analyzed web visitors’ scrolling behavior and determined the effect of the so-called “fold” on browsing activity.

One year later we are excited to publish much more detailed research, revealing new information and providing you with a whole new set of best practices and recommendations. This research is based on a sample of a data that was collected by the ClickTale service from thousands of websites and over 80,000 page views chosen at random between June 15th and July 15th, 2007.

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Nielsen NetRatings’ newly released ‘total minutes’ metric measures a site’s popularity based on how many minutes a page was open.  The new release is an improvement over the old ‘page views’ metric which does not take into account the duration of time for which a page was open on a user’s computer. Though an improvement over the older system, ‘total minutes’ does not take in to account the coffee and bathroom breaks of it’s human users. How often have you dropped whatever you were doing on line to go scavenging for food, or to run to the appointment you’ve forgotten about? In our case, it happens every day. Obviously, these sorts of incidents have the potential to skew the results significantly.

Enter ‘ActiveTime’, the technology employed by ClickTale’s analytics. ActiveTime values the time a user has spent interacting with a page, rather than just the amount of time a page has been left open. Even if you haven’t left your desk chair all morning, there is a pretty good chance that you’re surfing three, four, or even more sites at the same time. Maybe you’ve left something running on your screen to share with a colleague who’s out to lunch. Maybe you were the kind of kid whose mother had to remind them to put away whatever toy you were playing with before taking out a new one. Even though you finished reading the New York Times online edition before your coffee break, you may have neglected to close that window while working with another program. ClickTale, being aware of this phenomenon, and sensitive to the obstacles it poses, began including ActiveTime technology in their recording services more than a year ago. Using ActiveTime as a part of ClickTale produces more accurate and meaningful results than any other metrics system on the market.

So go ahead and signup for ClickTale, you can even take a coffee break in the middle of the process. We don’t mind ;).

Note: Since posting the data in this article, we have collected and analyzed much more detailed information regarding scrolling behavior of visitors. The research below reveals information about the location of the fold as well as some basic information about visitors’ scrolling behavior.

For more advanced research about statistical models for page scrolling behavior and visitor attention at each point in the page, please see the more recent research we have published in 2007 (ClickTale Scrolling Research Report V2.0 - part 1 and part 2). 

Web designers and usability professionals have debated the topic of web page scrolling since 1994. At the early days of the web, most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling and it was not a natural thing for them to do. As a result, web designers would design web pages so that all the important content would be “Above the fold” or even worse, squeeze the entire page into the initial screen area. This practice of “squeezing” continues even today.

Nowadays, scrolling has become a natural practice in surfing the web. Scrolling is also associated with web 2.0 design because big, clear text and “spacious”, “clean” content implies longer web pages.

In this post, we will demonstrate with charts and real data several behavioral patterns related to scrolling. Let’s start!

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Today I have decided to study the relationship between browsers, countries and browsing speed. For starters, let me explain how ClickTale measures browsing speed.

What we do is measure the time (in milliseconds) it takes to load the HTML (the DOM) for each page-view as well as the time it takes to load the entire page. The reason there are two separate parameters is that browsers usually continue loading images and other external resource some time after the entire HTML is loaded. We provide this load time data to our subscribers as part of the ClickTale service.

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As you have probably guessed, we have been using our own service from day one and have collected quite a lot of data over time. We have been analyzing our “Signup to Beta” page and decided to share some interesting results with you.

As you know, we record the browsing actions that take place on a webpage. This information allows us to make “movies” of page-sessions, as well as analyze accurate activity timing, clicks and attention information.

Below you will find two charts that were generated from a statistical subset of recordings. The first chart shows the distribution of users by the actual interaction time with the webpage (our ActiveTime™ statistic), separating users into those who decided to submit the form and those who decided not to. The second chart shows the distribution of the number of text characters typed by users.

This chart demonstrates that the average ActiveTime™ spent on this page is about 70 seconds. However, there is a clear difference between users who submitted the form to those who did not. Users who submitted the form spent an average of 98 seconds on the page, while those that did not submit the form, only spent an average of 36.6 seconds.

This chart demonstrates that most visitors type between 25 to 100 characters to submit the form and the actual average is 81.5.