ClickTale Blog

Did you know that about 40-50% of your site’s visitors leave after seeing just a single page?*

If half of your traffic disappears, it will take a heavy toll on your site’s conversion rate. Understanding why visitors leave and how they interact with your site is crucial to your business, and bottom line.

ClickTale has helped thousands of sites like yours gain insight into customer behavior by showing actual visitor sessions, mouse movements, clicks, scrolls and more.

Based on the feedback of many of our customers, as well as our own experiences, we have prepared a set of 8 ‘best practices’ to help you boost conversion rates and improve site usability.

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Google’s recent blog post describes how they use eye-tracking to improve the usability of the Google search results page, and showed that eye-tracking is a valuable technique for website optimization. The post received a lot of media attention, including mentions in leading blogs like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, all indications that eye-tracking techniques are of high value and of general interest.

Unfortunately, eye-tracking studies are prohibitively expensive, preventing most small and medium sized businesses from conducting their own studies and enjoying the benefits of this research method. Which is why the results of a Carnegie Mellon study titled “What can a mouse cursor tell us? Correlation of eye/mouse movements on web browsing” are so interesting and important.

The study showed that 84% of the times that a region was visited by a mouse cursor, it was also visited by (users’) eye gaze. In addition, 88% of regions that were not gazed by the eye were also not visited by a mouse cursor.

“I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I read the Carnegie Mellon study. After looking at hundreds of visitor sessions, I have no doubt that mouse cursor movements and eye gazes are highly correlated” says Tal Schwartz, Co-Founder and CEO of ClickTale.

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As any avid Olympics fan can tell you, time is of the essence. In the case of a ‘fingertip win’ like Michael Phelps’, even a hundredth of a second can make a difference between a gold and a silver medal.

The same principle applies to those of us with higher BMIs and underused gym memberships. Do you know that every single second you spend staring at the rotating hourglass on your screen has a direct effect on the way you interact with the site? It’s a fact.

Part 1 of our ClickTale Web Browsing Habits Report showed that:

• For every additional second that it takes to load a page, an extra 6 seconds is spent browsing that page.
• The Dutch and Israelis outsurf all other countries, with extremely fast Internet and in-page browsing speeds. The Chinese, with the slowest load times, spend three times as long on a typical page.

Okay, so page loading is not exactly up for consideration as an Olympic sport. However, while looking at the data we put together, we encounter a few fascinating record breakers. These are summarized at the end of this section.

One striking anomaly of the study was that Indians, whose Internet speed of 3.5 seconds is slower than average, browse an unprecedented five seconds more quickly than the stats predict. These five seconds matter.

Five seconds can mean the difference between a visitor completing a conversion on your site or being distracted by the US Gymnastics team. Hence, the fact that surfers in India take an average of 24 seconds to browse a site as opposed to the expected 29 is a phenomenon that begs an explanation.

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The Internet unites people from across the globe, but that doesn’t mean that all surfing experiences are created equal. We set out to learn how surfing differs from country to country. Our results were surprising, and a little puzzling too.

At ClickTale, we used our In-Page Web Analytics service to collect and analyze data from over 1 million visitors during the months of May and June 2008.

For starters, we wondered:

How fast are Internet speeds around the globe?

We measured Internet speeds using the average page loading speeds from each country. As you can see from figure 1 below, page loading speeds vary between 1.1 and 5.5 seconds. Israeli and Dutch surfers have the quickest page loads while Chinese and Brazilian surfers have the slowest. In fact, the Chinese experience Internet speeds that are 5 times slower than the Dutch!

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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.