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 Mouse Move Heatmaps 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, 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 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 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

Macro vs. Micro Conversions

Since the humble beginnings of web analytics back in 1994, there has always been an unhealthy fixation on the conversion rate as a website’s key metric. Understandably so, ecommerce sites often measure the success of their website by the amount of visitors who finally purchase a product. However, as a blog post by Avinash Kaushik advises, it is simply not worth your time to be obsessed with this one, often distorted, number. There are a myriad of other important “micro” conversions on your site that you could and should be focusing on.

In order to improve the value of your site to your visitors, it is essential to understand why they come to your site in the first place. All visitors are NOT created equal. Each one has his or her own reason for coming to your site and what he or she wishes to gain from it. Remember, most of your visitors probably do not come to make a purchase. If you have a product site, visitors could be trying to find price comparisons, product information, your address or opening times, all preparing for an in-store purchase.

The way we see it, if a visitor lands on your site and signs up for a newsletter, requests a product demo, or fills out a contact us form, then these actions might be worth more than a simple one time conversion. You’ve now got them sticking around for a long term commitment as opposed to a short term transaction. And their loyalty can ignite a growing fan base. Every time a visitor creates buzz about your website through a social network such as Facebook or Twitter, you should count it as a micro conversion. Often, a micro conversion like these can affect your end result much more than a single macro conversion alone.

How not to do it

For example, it is quite possible that a lot of the visitors landing on the American Airlines website are looking for flight arrival and departure information. However, more than a quarter of the AA landing page is devoted to booking while the arrival and departure information is hidden away in their navigation menus.

This landing page is clearly designed according to how American Airlines would like visitors to use their website, as opposed to how the visitors themselves would like to use it. Read More »

Many of our customers often ask what we mean when we say “In Page” web analytics, a term we coined several years ago. In this post, we’ll take a quick look at what In-Page analytics is, how it differs from other types of web analytics and why you need to use it.

What is In Page Analytics?

Most web analytics solutions capture visitors landing on a web page and monitor their movement from page to page within a site. This is great for collecting quantitative information about your website traffic, with pageviews, number of visitors and time on page being the key metrics. However, this traditional approach to web analytics can’t tell you much about what visitors do once inside these pages.

That’s where In-Page analytics comes in. It focuses on visitor interactions inside these pages, recording everything from mouse moves and clicks to actual keystrokes. This gives a much more qualitative, almost intimate, view into what your visitors are focusing on and interacting with inside the pages themselves.

Read More »

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 More »

Time on Page and Engagement Timeâ„¢

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 More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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!

Read More »