“We’ve already noticed our conversion rate has TRIPPLED, and the number of clicks required to convert has reduced dramatically.”

- Ben Sebborn, Director, Skiddle Ltd.

Skiddle, one of the UK’s top entertainment websites, suspected that its visitors weren’t browsing their site the way they were supposed to. They therefore decided to use ClickTale to find out exactly how their visitors were interacting with their site, and to use its revolutionary behavioural analytics suite to optimize their customers’ experience. What they learned was extremely insightful and resulted in an amazing 345% bookings increase in just 4 weeks!!

Skiddle saw phenomenal increases in their restaurant bookings

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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

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"With the data provided by ClickTale, we were able to cut abandonments by 50%!" - Ollie Pennington, Director, ServiceSeeking.com.au

By: Ollie Pennington, Director, ServiceSeeking.com.au

ServiceSeeking.com.au helps Australians get projects done by having businesses compete head to head for their work. The most important page on our site is the “Post Your Project” page where customers request new quotes. While projects were being submitted, our conversion rate was too low and we had to know what was going on inside the page.

We first heard about ClickTale from the Boagworld web design podcast and thought that watching movies of our visitors would be the best way to figure out usability issues on our site. Using their In-Page Analytics, we could finally figure out why our page was not converting as well as we had hoped.

Our “Post Your Project” form asks customers to give us 16 pieces of information. Using ClickTale’s Form Analytics Conversion and Drop Reports, we were able to see how many people were engaging with this form, how long it was taking to complete and which fields were causing customers to abandon the process.

From the Form Analytics reports we learned that:

• 44% of visitors left without engaging the form.
• 59% of visitors who did engage with the form abandoned it in the middle without submitting the form.
• 20% of visitors abandoned the form when we asked them to provide an approximate budget for their project.
• 10% of visitors abandoned the form when we asked them about their project location.

It became clear to us that asking for 2 pieces of relatively simple information (budget and location) was causing the bulk of the abandonments.
Using the great insights from our ClickTale data together with Luke Wroblewski’s book on web form design (discount offer below) we dramatically improved our conversion rate by taking the following steps:

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We are pleased to announce the launch of five amazing Web Page Reports, that you can start using right away.  These reports will let you identify and fix problematic pages, thereby improving your site usability, conversion rates and profitability.  Discover the answers to these essential questions:

1. Which pages cause low visitor engagement?
2. In which pages do visitors click too little or too much?
3. Which pages generate the most JavaScript errors?
4. Which pages discourage visitors from scrolling down?
5. Which pages take the longest to load?

These are important questions, and  the answers you discover will help you analyze and optimize your website pages.

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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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We are excited to announce the release of ClickTale Email Tracking™ which enables ClickTale subscribers, like you, to easily track any outgoing email campaign and watch videos of your recipients’ actions inside your website. Now you can not only see which recipients actually click on the link you provide but also watch their actions once they arrive to your landing page. To top it off, ClickTale will automatically record these visitors’ behavior on all subsequent visits to your website!

Incredibly easy to use, ClickTale Email Tracking provides immediate value to your campaigns by allowing you to track individual visitors (by their email address or other identifiable information) and watch video recordings of their particular sessions. That’s not all, you can also monitor how many pages these visitors browsed, how engaged they were and how many of them convert to a sale or any other unique action.

ClickTale Email Tracking will help you remove the guesswork involved in verifying the effectiveness of your campaign’s landing pages, and get a more solid understanding of how your email recipients are actually responding to your campaign efforts.

Usability Testing Galore

In a previous blog post, we discussed using ClickTale to conduct low cost usability testing. Email Tracking is a great addition to any usability test, allowing you to easily invite your current users to test new landing pages and receive immediate visual feedback.

True Conversion Rates

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Email Tracking is that it allows you to monitor your actual conversions and not conversions as conveyed by often inflated “click-through” rates. You can visually follow the activities of every visitor who actually arrives at your landing page. ClickTale will record every session your visitor starts, on any page in your site, completely automatically, as well as all future visits from the same visitor.

Easy to Get Going

With ClickTale Email Tracking you won’t need to make any code changes to your site. Simply define and add ClickTale Tags to the links, and let ClickTale do the rest. No code manipulation or additional development is needed! Read the rest of this entry »

We are happy to announce our newly updated user interface which provides unparalleled insights into your customers’ online behavior, yet is easy and fun to use. The new ClickTale UI offers a unified framework which enables quick navigation between different projects and easy access to reports and visitor recordings.

Your entry page is now the Projects page where you can manage all your account functions, create new projects or select an existing project to analyze. A project can be an entire website or just a few webpages that you would like to record and analyze.

Once you select a project, you arrive at its Dashboard page where you can access visitor recordings, search for specific visitors, and access Advanced Analytics reports such as: Heatmaps, Link Analytics and Form Analytics.

You can select a specific recording day from the Dashboard and then easily playback your visitors’ entire browsing sessions, change the recording date, sort by referring URL, and more.

Enjoy an updated interface to our Heatmaps which show where visitors pay attention and which areas of the page they skip.

By using our Search with over two dozen criteria, you can find and playback visitor sessions that provide insights into improving conversion rates. For example, find visitors who leave your shopping cart in the middle of a purchase or find visitors that bounce-off your landing pages and fail to convert.

Our revamped UI simplifies the process of generating Heatmaps, Form Analytics and other reports into simple step-by-step guided processes.

Notice the unified framework for all our reports; see for example the Form Analytics UI which helps you optimize your online forms.

If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to sign up to ClickTale and try our updated UI for yourself. We are confident you will enjoy using it and benefit from the easy navigation and access to valuable reports and visitor recordings.

We are looking forward to hearing from you, write your feedback below or send us your suggestions.

“It’s pretty amazing,” says Itai Becker, “We were searching for a service that would do exactly this… record the way users interact with our site. We found a few other solutions, each of which were good in their own way. But ClickTale was the answer to exactly what we were looking for: a service that would show us the actions and interactions of users on our site.”

As Brand Strategist, Becker focuses on making vacation planning as smooth as possible for his site’s users. Most of us enjoy traveling, but how many of us actually enjoy sorting through countless websites and blogs, to figure out exactly where to go and what to do when we get there? Tripbase.com turns the travel process ‘on its head’ by offering a variety of vacation ideas suited to the interests and budget of each traveler. For example, you can select whether you would like a hot or cold destination, if you would prefer to drive or fly, or even the ability to rank yourself a ‘nightlife junkie’ or a ‘nature fiend’, will deliver different results every time.

Using ClickTale, Becker and his team were able to determine that the site’s ‘destination page‘ with its long scroll bar was creating less retention and was causing confusion among users. Each destination that Tripbase suggests has a lot of meta data associated with it such as weather, attractions and deals. Becker watched ClickTale videos to understand which of these details are the most important to visitors, thereby allowing secondary information to be relocated to a separate page. Tripbase’s aim was to make the website as easy to navigate and as user-friendly as possible—they wanted travelers to be able to find the information quickly and comfortably.

On the basis of the data provided to them by ClickTale, the Tripbase team tweaked their design. The result, as can be seen on the ‘before and after’ screen shots below, is a significantly improved website. Becker credits ClickTale for enabling him to make the users’ experience much smoother and engaging.

Before

and after

ClickTale has also helped Becker confirm that his newly-implemented features are being used. For example, by watching video recordings of users on his site, he learned that visitors use the ‘map view’ option in parallel with the ‘list view’ of destinations when searching. He has also confirmed that visitors use the site’s ‘destination finder’ properly, and that his latest project, geared towards ‘road trip’ car vacations, has been very popular, indeed.

“ClickTale,” says Becker “is a very important piece of the analytics puzzle that lets you understand the user better, and cost-effectively improve your site. We are very excited that we have found it and even more excited since we began using it.”

Conversion Rate Experts, the gurus of maximizing online profitability, have selected ClickTale as one of the top 14 free tools that reveal why people abandon your website.

Conversion Rate Experts (we like to call them the “Gurus” ) specialize in turning your average eCommerce website into a money-making machine by generating phenomenal increases in profitability. Turns out that ClickTale is a big part of their secret sauce.

The “Gurus” have been using ClickTale for over 2 years and have included ClickTale as part of their methodology and consulting practice. Here is a quick preview of the process as we understand it:

Step 1: Watch ClickTale videos of visitors to identify where potential problem areas are on your website. There are lots of problems to look out for, here is a sampling:

1. Least active pages, where visitors are just bouncing away without doing much.
2. Poorly scrolled pages, where visitors don’t scroll below the fold.
3. Areas where visitors are clicking on unclickable objects.
4. Dead-end pages, where visitors do not find what they were looking for and quickly back out.
5. Boring content that does not engage your visitor.

Step 2: Once they identify the problems, the “Gurus” make massive changes to the website, re-routing traffic and creating new processes from scratch.

Step 3: Use multivariate optimization and other analytics tools to further increase conversions.

Step 4: Watch more ClickTale videos to make sure the major problem areas were fixed and find areas where performance can be further maximized.

Step 5: Go back to step 1 and watch more ClickTale videos.

In a follow-up article, we will interview the folks at Conversion Rate Experts and provide more details about just how they use ClickTale to achieve extraordinary profitability for their clients.

“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.