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.

Access to the Page Reports is from the Reports menu.

Your Most Engaging Pages

Find out which of your web pages are the most, and least, engaging. Knowing where your visitors are actively spending their time, how long they are really engaged for, and which pages they quickly leave are vital to your business.

The “Most Engaging Pages” report is based on a unique ClickTale statistic called Engagement Time^TM, which is calculated by adding up the amount of time that visitors are actually active on the page - by moving their mouse, clicking, etc. This is why Engagement Time^TM is a much better metric than “Time on Page” which is used by other analytics packages, including Google Analytics. “Time on Page” calculates how long the page was open for, so if a visitor went to get a coffee or began browsing on a different tab, those times get counted too (errors produced by “Time on Page” are further explained in the ROI Revolution blog). This means Engagement Time^TM is a crucial measure of how truly engaged your visitors are.

Your Most Clicked Pages

Uncover which of your pages get the most clicks by your visitors. Are visitors clicking as much as you thought they would? Get the high-level view with this report, and watch ClickTale movies of your visitors to see exactly where they click inside the page.

Your Most Error-ridden Pages

Discover which pages generate the most JavaScript errors - errors which cannot be detected using server side monitoring. Only ClickTale’s session recordings will pick up these errors, and display them to you during session playback, as well as in the “Most Errored Pages” report. Now you can easily find and fix the pages that cause your customers the most errors.

Your Least Scrolled Pages

It’s important to know which pages fail to entice visitors to scroll down, and whether scrolling behavior in a specific page is related to the page height (as measured in pixels) or to flaws in the page layout. Use ClickTale’s “Least Scrolled Pages” report to uncover your problematic pages. If visitors don’t scroll down, they miss out on your content and you will suffer lower conversion rates.

Your Slowest Loading Pages

Monitor which pages take the longest to load, and which load the fastest, based on visitors’ actual experience with your web pages. With the “Slowest Loading Pages” report, you may be surprised to discover how slow certain pages actually load. If visitors wait too long, they will leave your site for good.

Flexible and Customizable

All reports are flexible and can be customized to meet your needs. For starters, you can re-sort every report using any column in ascending or descending order. Next, use the control area at the bottom to customize and filter for pages containing any string, or filter for pages with a minimum number of visitors.

Finally, you can change the default Percentile that is used to sort pages in the first column to any number between 0 and 100%. By default, the 90^th Percentile is used which represents a value that is a “near-worst case scenario”.*

Available to all plans

These five amazing Page Reports are available now to all ClickTale subscribers, even on our Free plan. If you aren’t yet using ClickTale and benefiting from watching your visitors browsing sessions, heatmaps, and Form Analytics, these new Page Reports offer five more great reasons to sign up today and gain insights that you just can’t get anywhere else.

As you start using the Page Reports, we would love to hear your feedback and about the insights you have gained.

Thanks, and enjoy!
The ClickTale Team

* The 90^th Percentile means that 90% of the observations have a smaller value and only 10% of observations have a larger value. For example, the 100^th Percentile which is the maximum value of all observations, the 0^th Percentile is the minimum value and the 50^th Percentile is the middle value, also known as the Median.

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.

We’d love to hear your feedback and about your experience using ClickTale to optimize your website.

1. Visual-ize it

Images and movies are the easiest types of content to absorb quickly, and using them effectively can boost your readers’ attention span and encourage longer interactions.

Don’t forget to make images clickable! They will be clicked!

Schwan’s uses images superbly and, in fact, are one of the highest converting retail websites around.

Did you know?
People love looking at faces, especially the faces of attractive people…

Esquire.com uses lots of images to get visitor attention. How many faces can you count? We counted 9!

2. Read this and Win

Did we get your attention? Are your headlines working for, or against you? If your visitors aren’t immediately captured by your headlines, they’ll quickly leave your site. Don’t worry! You don’t need to be a world-class copywriter to come up with great headlines. With a little bit of practice, and some testing, you can hone your headline skills and grab the attention of your audience.

Ask yourself these short questions:

• Is the headline short and to the point?
• Is it worded in terms of benefits to the visitor (and not product features)?

Your headlines should encourage the visitor to continue reading, highlighting the benefits of doing so while keeping it believable and specific.

Apple.com website says so much with just a few well chosen words.

Want to learn more about writing headlines? Read about how to write the “World’s Best Headlines” in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.

3. Put your Best Stuff up Top

Most readers never scroll down, and when they do the drop-off rate follows a distinct pattern (see graph below). In fact, page areas near the top of the page get about 17 times more exposure than the areas near the bottom of the page, according to a research report by ClickTale. This means that everything important or newsworthy, or any call to action, needs to be above the page fold.

The chart above shows where on the page visitors are paying attention, as they scroll towards the bottom of the page. To see your own visitors’ scrolling behavior, we recommend using ClickTale’s Scrolling Heatmaps.

4. Make content Pop

The really important stuff, the things you want to stand out, should be emphasized. Did you notice how we use bold typeface to draw your attention to certain words or sentences? Experiment with font size, bold, italics, color and highlighting to find the most effective places and methods to grab your readers’ attention and call them to action.

Conversion Rate Experts do an excellent job using different font styles and colors to get their messages across.

5. WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?)

Sites usually get it wrong by focusing on themselves (the site) and not the user (i.e. “Me”). Chapter 3 of Dan Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, a fantastic manga-style career guide, puts it this way: “It’s not about you”.

That’s right, accept it, it’s not. It’s about the user community, that is, your sites target audience. Your site exists to serve this audience, and everything done on your site should have this focus.

This Best-Practice is actually quite simple.
Ask yourself these questions:

• Is this page/form/offer/etc actually of real value to my audience?
• Why should they care?
• How is it useful to them?

Mint.com homepage concisely conveys what’s-in-it-for “you” (their potential customers).

6. You ask TOO much

We hate to be the one to tell you this, but you ask for too much info on your signup forms and checkout pages! Visitors are extremely sensitive to the quantity and type of information asked from them, and every additional question significantly decreases the likelihood of form completion, harming your conversion rates.

Did you know?
The least-intrusive and fewest-question forms are the biggest winners.

Facebook is a great example of a simple, short and effective sign up form.

Two Tribes used ClickTale’s Form Analytics to optimize their online forms and got a 50% increase in conversion rates.

7. Watch your visitors

Running usability tests used to be difficult and expensive. Not anymore. With ClickTale (start using it for Free) you’re able to conduct usability testing by watching your visitors’ actual browsing sessions.

Usability testing will help you discover what’s “broken” on your website, and answer questions like:

• Why are visitors leaving my landing pages?
• Why do they fail to make purchases?
• Which pages never get scrolled?

Watch this short (about a minute) ClickTale video to learn how to run online usability testing.

Did you know?
Breaking down problems makes it easier to fix them. After running usability testing, compile a list of the top 5 things that are “broken” on your site. This will help you focus on the most urgent problems, and prioritize issues. Once you’re done, go to step #8 (Testing).

8. Test - Repair - Retest

Small changes often make major impacts on the bottom line, which is why we recommend that you test every section of your site, in order to maximize revenue and conversion potential. Using a service such as Google’s Website Optimizer to run “multivariate tests” or running a simple A/B test, is a great way to see what works best.

Run your testing in three stages:

I. Fix all of the things that are “broken” (which you’ll discover during your usability tests, see #7 above). This is worth doing first, because it’s the easiest way to make quick improvements.

II. Watch your visitors again with ClickTale, to make sure you actually fixed what was broken. If things are still screwy, or if further tweaking is necessary, go back to step I.

III. Test new ideas that have the potential to significantly grow your business. Again, it’s important to watch the results of your changes to see how they are really impacting your business.

Here is an example of an A/B/C experiment using Google’s Website Optimizer.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to web design, there are no firm set of rules. But following these simple guidelines will help you optimize your site and improve conversion rates, as it has ours and thousands of other websites.

So remember:

1. Fantastic visuals grab visitors attention
2. Great headlines encourage action
3. Float your best content to the top
4. Make important content stand out
5. WIIFM
6. Fewer questions boost conversions
7. Run usability tests
8. Test, repair, and retest

We would love to hear how these guidelines (or any other tips) have helped you with your site optimization. Send us your experiences and we will mention your feedback in a future follow-up article!

Still hungry for more tips?

• Check out the 108 Tips from Conversion Rate Experts. Hey, look at that, we’re on the list.
• Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert
• 7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert

New Advanced Search functionality

• Optimize your landing pages by watching the visitors who arrive at specific pages
• Increase your conversion rates by watching visitors who failed to complete a purchase or did not sign-up
• … read more

Marketing Campaign Tracking

• Watch how visitors respond to your landing pages, and improve the effectiveness of your email and marketing campaigns.
• …read more

So you think you know ClickTale? Are you taking advantage of these powerful features?

Form Analytics™

• Optimize your checkout pages and online forms.
• …read more

Attention Heatmaps™

• Reduce website abandonment rates
• Maximize content effectiveness by page location
• …read more

Link Analytics™

• Get a broader picture on how visitors interact with your website
• Understand all visitor interactions with your links, fields and buttons
• ..read more

Word on the street. What they’ve been saying about us.

“Using ClickTale’s analytics pays off - really”

“ClickTale … provides a real time measurement of user engagement”

“Clicktale is one of the most innovative web analytics solutions in the market. Two thumbs up!”

“Recording website visitors opens up a powerful new aspect of website analytics.”

“All I can say about this free tool is WOW.”

“A truly invaluable tool for professional optimization!!”

“A fantastic tool which is going to change the way that web designers design.”

You can read all of the latest media mentions on our site.

As always, your input, questions and feedback are important to us.
Tell us what you think about ClickTale and our latest innovations, and how ClickTale has helped you improve conversion performance or online usability. Let us know by contacting us!

You can now follow us on Twitter.

Sincerely,

The ClickTale Team

If you’re not familiar with Magento, then you owe it to yourself to check them out. The new module will allow you to inject your ClickTale tracking code automatically into all of your web pages.

So, what’s so special, you ask? The module caches complete versions of each and every page view as it is delivered to your customer. That’s right! No matter what version of your site they see, ClickTale video playbacks will show you the exact content as seen and interacted with by your visitors.

Now, you can integrate ClickTale seamlessly into the Magento eCommerce platform, and take full advantage of ClickTale’s web analytic offerings. The module creates recording sessions and aggregate reports, which help you:

• Improve site usability
• Reduce shopping cart abandonment
• Enhance form conversions
• Optimize landing pages

Want to be one of the first to get your hands on the module?
We have recently begun beta testing, and if you are using Magento and would like to become a beta tester, please contact us.
The ClickTale-Magento Beta is limited to the first 100 users, so hurry while there are still invites.

More about Magento

Magento is groundbreaking eCommerce software. With more than 500,000 downloads - and counting - it is the fastest growing eCommerce platform in the market. A feature-rich, enterprise-grade eCommerce solution, Magento offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the user experience, content and functionality of their online stores. Magento’s intuitive administration interface includes powerful tools for marketing, search engine optimization and catalog management, enabling merchants to create sites tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.

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.

The study found a very strong correlation between eye-gaze position and mouse cursor position; so strong in fact, that the study (by the Human-Computing Interaction Institute and the Psychology Department) concludes:

“By predicting the users’ interests on web pages, mouse device could be a very good alternative to an eye-tracker as a tool for usability evaluation. By predicting the gaze position, we might be able to infer user’s intent based on the mouse data, and use this to evaluate interface design.”

ClickTale comes to the rescue (once again)

ClickTale lets you conduct usability testing, that work almost exactly like the expensive eye-tracking studies, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

How? It’s simple, just use ClickTale to record your users’ mouse movements, and discover where they are gazing and how they are interacting with your site.

The Carnegie Mellon study showed that web surfers move their mouse cursors to regions they are looking at. 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.

Carnegie Mellon has succeeded in validating what many web professionals have known for a while - a strong correlation exists between where a user looks and where they hover their mouse. We hear it from our own customers, and witness it on our own web pages: Watching the mouse works.

In fact, in a recent interview, John Marshall, CTO & Founder at MarketMotive.com, had this to say about ClickTale:

“You actually get to see a movie of what people do on the website, where the mouse goes, where they scroll, where they linger. It’s amazing that people often use the mouse as an indicator to help them read text. You can even see, in many cases what people are reading. It’s fascinating. We really learn a lot (through watching these videos).”

Be Google-like, only smarter

So why not be like Google, but for a fraction of their budget, and use ClickTale to conduct advanced, yet super-cheap, usability studies of your website.

We would love to hear about your success using ClickTale to run usability testing. Let us know here!

ClickTale, the world leader of In-Page Analytics, today announced integration with the Omniture Genesis Network. E-Business decision makers can now view site-wide analytics and drill down to see their customers’ actual online experiences, showing individual mouse movements, scrolls, clicks, and keystrokes, as well as aggregate behavioral reports. ClickTale’s Visitor Session Playback^TM provides insights into why customers succeed or fail online, which helps increase conversion rates and optimize overall online business success.

“Congratulations to Omniture. Users will greatly benefit from the astounding insights delivered by ClickTale’s ‘In-page’ analytics. Understanding what’s happening on your website is a vital step in extracting more profit from your traffic, and in our opinion ClickTale is an essential part of that process. It is an outstanding complement to Omniture’s existing solutions,” says Ben Jesson, Co-Founder & CEO of Conversion Rate Experts, an international consultancy that inspires and helps website owners dominate their market.

Alongside Omniture reporting, ClickTale delivers In-Page aggregated reports of visitor behavior inside specific webpages. For example, Form Analytics^TM assists in the optimization of online forms, with enhanced insight into which form fields cause visitor abandonment, which fields take too long to complete, and which ones generate errors. Attention Heatmaps^TM provide a visual display of what visitors pay the most attention to, what they ignore or skip, and how far down the page they scroll.

“We’re very excited about our partnership with Omniture, as this alliance enables our own 20,000+ users to gain access to an extended set of analytic tools. We’re also thrilled to offer the ClickTale suite to a new audience, that can now reap the benefits of watching, and understanding, their customers’ actual browsing sessions,” says Tal Schwartz, ClickTale’s CEO.

Omniture’s reports and conversion funnels are now complemented by ClickTale’s visitor-level drill-down capabilities, which provide insights into the reasons visitors fail to convert. E-Business decision makers can use these two powerful analytic tools in conjunction, and gain a more meaningful understanding of their site’s visitors, and more effectively reduce shopping cart abandonment, optimize landing pages and improve their site’s usability.

According to Adam:

“Google Analytics only tells you who came, who left and who submitted the form but provides no further insight into the underlying problems…To dig deeper you need to use a form analytics tool and I can’t recommend ClickTale enough.

After reviewing my client’s ClickTale data we removed some fields, renamed some and changed the options on others and just one week later he saw a 50% increase in number of leads submitted and conversion rates climbed from 25% to 36%.

As you can see it’s a big improvement from changes that took a couple of hours to implement…Fixing some of the issues on your forms is a cheap and effective way of increasing conversion rates which lead ultimately to a sustainable increase in revenue for the cost of less than a day of the Google AdWords campaign.”

Adam explains how simple and quick it is to use ClickTale, and how marketers can benefit from almost instantaneous increases in conversion rates. Read the rest of this valuable case study directly on the Adam Howitt Consulting Blog.

If you too have experienced improved conversions thanks to ClickTale, we would love to hear about it! Send in your story here.

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!

How to setup ClickTale Email Tracking

Setup is simple as it only involves modifying the hyperlink address that leads to the landing page. Simply choose a tag, for example let’s call it “MyTag”, and add it to a hyperlink as follows:

http://domain/page?ct=enable,t(MyTag)

• The ?ct= parameter tells the ClickTale Tracking code to process the subsequent commands
• The enable command means that ClickTale will always record the visitor, even if you are only recording a fraction of visitors to your landing page
• The t(MyTag) command indicates that “MyTag” is the tag name used to track this campaign

If you are using a Mail Merge tool or an email marketing service, you can add a customer_email variable to identify specific customers as they arrive on your website. Simply add the tag containing the customer_email variable, as follows:

http://domain/page?ct=enable,t(MyTag),t(customer_email)

That’s it, you’re done! Just sit back and watch videos of your customers browsing sessions as they respond to your email campaigns.

For a complete list of Email Tracking and advanced API functionality, check out our support forum.

You can enjoy the benefits of ClickTale Email Tracking™ today by subscribing to one of our premium paid plans.

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.

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.”