Summer is nearly over, but the action at ClickTale has only just begun. We are going to be at 6 major conferences over the next two months and are looking forward to meeting and reconnecting with both old and new faces.  Have a look below for our anticipated appearances:

Shop.org 2010 - September 27-29, Dallas

Our travels kick off in Dallas as we join Shop.org at the end of September.  The list of keynotes includes speakers from Shoebuy.com, URBN and Southwest Airlines just to name a few.  This is THE event to be at if you have anything to do with internet retail or ecommerce.  What’s more, we’re giving away FREE tickets to ALL ClickTale customers, so if you’re interested in going, just let us know before the 14^th and we’ll be happy to hook you up.

eMetrics - October 3-7, Washington

Next, we’re flying over to the east coast as we head to Washington, D.C. We’ll be making an appearance at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, where some of the biggest names in web analytics get together.  Keynote speakers will include Jim Sterne, Joe Megibow, Bob Page and Adam Greco among many others.

Conversion Conference East - October 4-5, Washington

While in D.C., we’re also attending the latest Conversion Conference East that has got the industry buzzing.  Finally, an entire event focusing entirely on website performance, usability and conversion rates!  Highly anticipated keynote speakers for the event include industry leading names like Tim Ash and Patrick Bultema.  You don’t want to miss out on this event if you wish to get the most out of your traffic and online campaigns.

UXI Live 2010 - October 5th, Herzliya, Israel

Over in Israel, we’re attending UX Israel, a conference that offers a series of lectures, workshops, and excellent networking opportunities amongst the top usability experts in the area.  Our very own Dr. Tal Schwartz will be giving an in-depth and informative presentation on ClickTale solutions through numerous successful case studies.

Internet Retailing - October 10th, London

After that, we’re off to London for Internet Retailing at the beginning of October.  We’ll be amongst some of the world’s most influential names in the online industry, with keynotes from Dave Hughes of Marks & Spencer and Clare Gilmartin from eBay.  This is an event for any business budget with free access to the exhibit hall, so you can still get in on all the networking action.

Ecommerce Expo - October 19-20, London

Finally, we’re wrapping up our fall conferences at the Ecommerce Expo, one of Europe’s largest gatherings of Ecommerce professionals.  Keynote speakers from some of the biggest companies in the ecommerce industry, including Amazon, Google, More Th>n, Moneysupermarket, and Argos will be presenting.  What’s more, the entire event is FREE, so there are absolutely no excuses not to be there!

Be in touch

If you’re going to be at any of these events, let us know!  We’d really love to arrange a time to chat or meet up at our booth.  Feel free to contact us directly or comment below if you know you are going to be around.  And just to give you some extra encouragement, we’ll be giving away FREE treats such as exclusive ClickTale discounts at all of our booths! So come on down and meet us in person, we can’t wait to see you there!

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.

What are the key differences?

Although technically a form of web analytics, InPage analytics differs greatly from traditional analytics in a number of ways:

Some Examples:

When running a campaign with a landing page:

Traditional analytics will tell you how many people came to your landing page and what pages they looked at. InPage analytics will tell you how they engaged with the page, what content they looked at, and what elements they interacted with.

When optimizing an online form:

Traditional analytics will tell you how many people successfully completed or dropped out of the form. InPage analytics will tell you at which fields within the form customers drop out, how much time they spent filling in each field, which fields they left blank, etc…

When analyzing a conversion funnel:

Traditional analytics will tell you where people drop out of the funnel. InPage analytics will visually show you what visitors did within the page, so you can gain insight into why they left.

Traditional web analytics reports (left) vs. In-Page Analytics (right)

Types of In-Page Analytics Reports

There are four main categories of InPage Analytics reports. From the most qualitative to most quantitative these are:

1. Session Playback: Actual playable recordings of visitors browsing your website. A must for improving website usability and discovering why customers fall out of funnels.
2. Visual Heatmaps: Aggregated reports of visitor engagement inside the page. Heatmaps show what parts of a page are looked at, clicked on, focused on and interacted with by visitors. These are essential for creating persuasive design and understand your customers’ interests.
3. Site Overlays: Statistical data overlaid on top of the page content. Site Overlays are used to evaluate web links, call to action buttons and visitor navigation.
4. InPage Statistics: Purely quantitative data such as engagement time, scroll reach, fold height, etc. Often used as KPIs and for analyzing page performance.

When and how to use In-Page Analytics

In-Page analytics can and should be used in every step of a website’s product cycle - from design, development and testing, all the way to ongoing site optimization. How to use it, however, varies greatly depending on the objective of your site and each individual page.

As with any web analytics project, always define what you are looking to find before you begin. Clearly stating your website’s objective(s), both from your point of view and your visitors’, is crucial before embarking on any web analytics project.

With In Page analytics, you should define these objectives based on your customers’ experience on your site. Ask questions such as:

• “How easy was my site for visitors to use?”
• “Did my visitors find what they were looking for?”
• “Were there any usability or navigational issues?”
• “Were my visitors ABLE to convert?”

And NOT:

• “How much traffic do I have?”
• “How many of my visitors converted?”

How to measure success

For starters, you need to define your KPIs by each page’s objective. For example:

If you have an ecommerce website, your performance can be defined by how many visitors saw your call to action buttons, read product descriptions or were able to find the product they were looking for. Within product pages, how many people were able to find the “add to cart” button, and within your checkout form, how many people were able to quickly and easily purchase a product.

If you have a content rich blog or news site, you’ll want to look at heatmaps to find out which headlines and images grabbed your visitors’ attention, what paragraphs get the most interest and what articles are actually being read as opposed to simply scrolled though. A “successful” article would be one with high engagement times and long, consistent scroll rates.

Whatever your site, In Page analytics lets you peek into the subconscious minds of your visitors. This takes a substantial amount of guesswork out of web design and testing, allowing you to build and optimize websites based on your visitors’ actual In Page browsing behavior.

Shmuli is the Director of Marketing and Communications for ClickTale, the world leader in In-Page Analytics. A self proclaimed “web analytics geek”, Shmuli has spent an unhealthy amount of time focusing on web analytics, conversion rates and usability. Through his obsession, he aspires to help websites worldwide reach their maximum potential and obtain the love of their visitors.

Today, ClickTale is launching two new heatmap analytics, which are set to revolutionize the way the industry looks at both heatmaps and visual analytics as a whole.

Our new Segmented Heatmaps give site owners the ability to filter ClickTale’s full range of visual heatmaps based on any customer information or browsing behavior. With our new Ultra Scale Heatmaps, site owners can view data from as many as 100,000 pageviews in a single graphical report, delivering accurate results at a fraction of the cost of traditional eye-tracking studies.

“The biggest challenge many site owners face is measuring visitor engagement and site usability on a realistic and affordable scale,” said Dr. Tal Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of ClickTale. “These new heatmap features reveal unprecedented detail about visitor behavior patterns that can be used to make on-the-fly website changes that improve site usability and conversion rates.”

We can see what new visitors look at on our homepage (left), as opposed to existing customers (right)

Segmented Heatmaps

The new Segmented Heatmaps feature allows businesses to discover exactly how different user groups interact with their website, delivering unparalleled insights into their customers’ behavior. These heatmaps can be segmented by any metric desired, for example you can find out:

• How existing customers behave as opposed to first time shoppers?
• What did converted customers notice on your site? And why did certain visitors not convert?
• Do customers who come from a search engine behave differently from those that come from an SEM, email, or any other campaign?
• What did bounced visitors look at on your homepage? And what can you do to keep them on your site?
• Does age, gender, location or language impact your customer’s browsing behavior?

This level segmentation is available for our full range of heatmaps, Mouse Move, Click, Attention and Scroll-Reach. Webmasters now have an unprecedented ability to gain insights into their customers’ actual browsing behavior, allowing them to optimize their site’s conversion rates and usability like never before.

Understand exactly what your visitors look at on the page, and what they don't

Ultra-Scale Heatmaps

ClickTale’s Ultra Scale Heatmaps aggregate the browsing sessions from as many as 100,000 visitors in a single image, allowing for usability testing on a vast, global scale. And with an 84-88% correlation between our Mouse Move Heatmaps and expensive eye-tracking studies, website owners can now conduct incredibly accurate usability studies on a massive scale, and at a fraction of the cost.

We believe our new Segmented and Ultra-Scale Heatmaps, as well as our full video playback and other behavioral analytics, make ClickTale the perfect complement to your traditional web analytics suite. Sign up today and start learning how to optimize your website based on your customers’ actual behavior. Start increasing your conversion rates, minimizing your site abandonment, and maximizing your profits.

*Availability may vary by subscription plan.

The module contains our four most popular search filters:

• Pages visited - find visitors based on the pages they visited within your site.
• Page count - find visitors based on the number of pages they saw within your site.
• Original referrer - find visitors based on how they came to your site.
• Events* - find visitors based on any behavioral or visitor events they encountered, such as a JavaScript error, clicking on a certain button, our coming from a specific email campaign.

Let’s look at a few simple examples you can try for yourself to find relevant and valuable customer videos:

Bounced visitors

Unlike traditional web analytics, ClickTale has always been able to tell you exactly what bounced visitors do on your site. This simple search will find bounced visitors who visit your homepage, but leave before seeing any other page.

1. Under Page Count, select 1 to 1.
2. Under Pages Visited, select your homepage URL or any other landing page you want to test.

Lost potential customers

These are customers who were interested in what your site had to offer, and visited at least five pages. They eventually came to a signup, payment or checkout page, but never actually converted. These are incredibly important videos to watch, as they are the “could have, would have, should have” customers which are often so easy to get back:

1. Under Page Count, Select 5 to 20.
2. Under Event Segmentation, select the signup or checkout page event with a , and the submit or confirmation button with a .

N.B. ClickTale subscribers that don’t have events on their account can use a checkout page URL and payment confirmation page URL instead.

Visitors from Google campaigns or search query

The Original Referrer filter is great for finding visitors that came from any source, including search engines, but can also be used to find videos of customers who came from a Google campaign or search query. For example:

• Use this followed by any keyword to find visitors who came from any specific search term. For example, “http://www.google.com/search?q=clicktale” will show us videos of visitors who came to our site after searching Google for the term “clicktale”.

• This will find visitors who came from a Google AdWords campaign.

• This will find visitors who came from a Google AdSense campaign.

Seek and you shall find

Don’t forget you can always click on the “Add search parameters”, or the “search” link in the sidebar to access our full search and alerts feature. Define any business process, scenario or funnel and see exactly which visitors completed the process, which dropped out, and why! Its features like these that really let you get the most of your ClickTale data.

If you haven’t already, you can sign up to ClickTale today and start optimizing your website based on your customers’ actual behavior. Start increasing your conversion rates, minimizing your site abandonment, and maximizing your profits.

*Please note that ClickTale Events are only available on certain subscription plans. For more information please see the plan comparison.

Our new Dashboard is a totally refreshed, sleek user interface, built from the ground up on actual customer experience to give the end-user quick access to all of the most critical website metrics. We’ve used our own tool to find out exactly what our users want to get out of ClickTale, and made it easier than ever to view complete site performance metrics all from a single page, with drill-down access to more detailed analytics.

The dashboard currently includes a snapshot of six analytics modules, including:

Heatmaps

The Dashboard provides instant access to our comprehensive visual heatmaps, aggregating thousands of visitors’ browsing sessions into a clear and easy-to-use report. In a matter of moments you can see exactly where visitors look, where they click, what content they pay attention to and how far down they scroll.

Visitor Recordings

See absolutely everything visitors do on your webpage in just a few clicks. Watch recordings of your visitors’ full browsing sessions to discover exactly how they use your site, or find specific videos of visitors who abandoned your shopping cart, experienced errors, or could not find what they are looking for.

Site Monitor

This module reveals vital statistics on page engagement times, load times, click metrics, errors and scroll rates to help analyze both your entire website and individual page performance.

Form Analytics

Get a quick, performance overview of your most popular form, with instant access to conversion rates, completion times and error reports. Access the full Form Analytics drill-down information in a single click, to find out exactly what fields were left blank, where customers dropped out, and how many visitors tried to convert but couldn’t.

Visitor Geo-location

Get an instant view of user metrics by country, with the ability to click on any area to view visitor recordings of users from that region. Easily compare user behavior across geographic areas.

Real-Time monitor

Watch visitors browsing your site in real time. Now incredible usability testing and page optimization results are available in seconds, rather than hours or days as with traditional web analytics. Be able to make instant decisions, on-the-fly changes and site improvements.

The new Dashboard is live today, so you can login to your account now to see it in action. If you’re not yet a ClickTale customer, sign up today and start optimizing your website based on your visitors’ actual browsing behavior.

Optima Systems is the UK’s leading office partitioning specialist, offering quality service and innovative design. They approached Cyber-Duck.co.uk, an award-winning London based digital agency, and asked them to help improve their conversion rates. They expected great results, but even they were amazed at the improvements!

“ClickTale was the obvious tool for the job,” said Lefteris Grammatas from Cyber-Duck “I am an active member on the Web Analytics Association and I follow many analytics mailing lists, groups and analytics experts’ blogs. We often use Google Analytics with ClickTale as they complement each other perfectly.”

Methodology

Cyber-Duck used ClickTale’s qualitative reports in conjunction with Google Analytics’ quantitative statistics to create a complete overview of what was happening on their website.

“Below are the four steps we took to get a massive increase in conversion rates:

1. Business Scope: Using Google Analytics and our customer feedback we identified the key pages and key visitor behaviors that we wanted to review and optimize with ClickTale.
2. Traffic Data: For every key page selected we measured its characteristics, including Attention Time, Bounce Rate, Visitor Type and which pages the users visited before and after. By doing this we provided an appropriate context to review the ClickTale reports.
3. ClickTale Data: Next, we moved to ClickTale to review the heatmap analysis and quantify how visitors were using the page in terms of Scrolling, Clicking, and Hovers. We also used some of ClickTale’s more sophisticated tools such as the Advanced Filtering and Link Analytics’ Hover Conversion rate.
4. Behavioral Data: Having these three layers of information available meant we were able to concentrate on specific issues during our observational analysis. By doing so we managed to understand users’ behaviors and trends very quickly, and came up with several actionable suggestions.”

A visitor to the homepage unsuccessfully trying to get to a product page.

Optimization

Lefteris explains:

“We followed the above methodology and identified that many visitors were undertaking the following conversion path to register:

Homepage > Product Page > Registration

As the product page is a vital part of the conversion path, we scrutinized these pages using the ClickTale search tool. After watching just a few individual videos, we found that visitors were losing their way inside this page. These findings were then reinforced by looking at the Mouse Move Heatmaps. Improving customer flow within the product page therefore became our key objective.

This is how the page looked before:

We achieved this by making two simple changes to the page design:

• First we cleared up the top and sidebars. We removed unnecessary links and simplified the image.
• Second, we emphasized the flow by highlighting the expandable areas of the page and replacing the arrows with “Expand +”

Here it is after our redesign:

Watching videos of our homepage exposed two additional facts about our visitors’ behavior. First, visitors coming from Organic Traffic preferred to click on ‘textual’ links than on navigational elements or banners. And second, most of our “non-purchasing” traffic came to our site to download guides and whitepapers.

Using this evidence we made a hypothesis that if we made our PDF downloads available from our homepage via ‘textual’ links, and required users to register with us before they could download, we would see a massive boost in registrations.

So we changed the top right box on the homepage from this:

To this:

Once we were happy with the performance of the “Downloads” box, we implemented the change throughout the rest of the site, including the new product pages.

Results

Within just 10 days, our new layout was a clear winner! Our conversion rate had jumped by 30% and our bounce rate had dropped by 9%. What’s more, the visitor time on site had increased by 26% and the number of pages viewed by each visitor had increased by 19%. “We would never have been able to see such incredible results in so little time if it wasn’t for ClickTale,” Lefteris concluded.

All the tools used in this study are available to all our subscribers, so sign up today and learn how to optimize your website based on your customers’ actual behavior. Start increasing your conversion rates, minimizing your site abandonment, and maximizing your profits.

The summer is nearly here, and ClickTale is going on the road. We’re going to be at four major events over May and June, and would love to meet you in person. We’re going to be attending:

eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit - May 3-7, San Jose.

We’re kicking it off in California, at Jim Sterne’s world renowned eMetrics Summit. The speakers will include some of the biggest and brightest in the industry, with keynotes from Avinash Kaushik, Eric Peterson and Bryan Eisenberg. We’re also giving away a 20% discount off the 3 day summit pass, so you have no excuse not to be there! If you’re interested just let us know in the comments below and we’ll send it to you right away.

Conversion Conference West 2010 - May 4-5, San Jose.

Next we’ll be at the world’s first Conversion Conference. That’s right, an entire event focusing on website performance, usability and conversion rates! With keynote speakers like the remarkable Tim Ash and the legendary Jakob Nielsen, it is going to be THE event for anyone who wants to get the most out of their traffic and online campaigns.

The Omniture Summit - May 20-21, London.

After that, it’s a trip across the Atlantic for a short stop in London. We’ll be at the Omniture Summit at the end of May with some of the world most influential individuals in the online industry. We’ll hear keynotes from likes of Martin Lindstrom, Josh James and Brett Error, and have a chance to meet many of our customers face to face, so feel free to come along!

Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition - June 8-11, Chicago.

Finally, we’re finishing off our summer conferences at America’s largest ecommerce event, the IRCE. With over 5,000 attendees, this is the place to be if you have anything to do with making money online. Some of the biggest names in the ecommerce industry, such as Stephanie Tilenius, Imran Jooma and Tony Ellison will all be giving keynotes, as well at over 170 other expert speakers. We’re giving away $100 discount for the entrance ticket, just comment below if you’re interested and we’ll send you the link.

Be in touch

If you’re going to be at any of these events, we’d really love to meet up. Feel free to contact us directly to arrange a time to chat. What’s more, we’ll be giving away free goodies such as exclusive ClickTale discounts at all our booths so come on down and meet us in person. We’re looking forward to a wonderful summer, and wishing you the same.

You can send us any discoveries you’ve made using ClickTale, learn from the others’ experiences, and see how ClickTale has been used by websites great and small all over the globe. All Showcase projects will appear on our corporate blog and each month the best projects will be included in our monthly newsletter that goes out to over 40,000 subscribers.

By sharing your projects with us you’ll get some great buzz for your site, as well as helping out our ever growing community. There are no strict requirements or qualifications, any experiences you have had with ClickTale that will benefit the community would be great. It’s a wonderful way to get your designs out there for some constructive comments, positive feedback and free word of mouth marketing!

If you’re interested in having your webpage featured in our upcoming showcase, please send a nice email to showcase@clicktale.com.

You cannot think of ClickTale as another cool feature that is available for your online business. It is mandatory service for every ecommerce site and if you don’t take advantage of it, you may be losing thousands of dollars annually. My name is Igor Soshkin and I am the CEO of ShoppingCartElite, our company offers a very advanced and sophisticated ecommerce shopping cart platform, and I’m here to talk a little bit about our experiences with ClickTale.

Some entrepreneurs might think that using ClickTale is a one-time optimization job, but in reality ClickTale can and should be used every single day to monitor your visitors’ interactions with your website.

WE USE CLICKTALE:

• To optimize visitor behaviour on the template level of the website. This task is usually done by designers and developers working together.
• We research the template to enhance the experience of the visitor, so the visitor can have an easy time getting from point A to point B.
• We also enhance the call to action on each web page, so the visitor does exactly what we want to them to do.

Imagine ClickTale as being the cameras that you would install if you had a physical store front location. You can set up the cameras in a one-off test to figure out if visitors are able to get from point A to point B. But in order to see if your visitors enjoy browsing your store, you would really need to monitor those cameras on a daily basis.

OUR CLIENTS USE CLICKTALE:

I already mentioned that ClickTale can be used to optimize your website template, but it can also be used for marketing optimization. You are able to monitor your visitors’ behaviour, identify visitor trends, optimize your products, prices and graphics to have your visitors do exactly what you want them to do.

Here are some examples of problems our customers find and fix daily using ClickTale:

• Product prices may be too high or not high enough
• Visitors may be having problems finding the right products
• Visitors may not be finding what they are looking for
• The product sales copy may not be convincing enough
• Visitors may be missing certain goals that you set for them
• Your website graphics may not be meeting the theme that your visitor expects
• You may have too many calls to action on a specific webpage

If you had a restaurant, wouldn’t you want to see if your customers are enjoying their meal? If you had a clothing store, wouldn’t it be nice to look at the facial expressions of your visitors once they look at the price tag of a specific product? This is what ClickTale can do for your online store. It can give you those Cameras on your website to monitor your visitors’ every step. By using ClickTale you will be able to understand if your visitors like your website or not.

If you want this task done for you, then a simple solution would be to sign up with Shopping Cart Elite. Unlike other hosted ecommerce platforms, we optimize all our clients’ website templates using ClickTale. Since this is a never ending task, we are constantly improving the templates to enhance the visitor experience and help our clients gain higher conversions on their websites.

We strongly encourage our clients to have ClickTale recording all the time, especially if they are constantly adding new products. Every time a new product is added, you should monitor it with ClickTale to optimize the conversion rate for that product.  Signing up for 1 year of ClickTale subscription will give you the assurance that you can’t screw up your website, because you are always overlooking your visitors and making sure they are satisfied with their experience on your website.

Igor Soshkin is the CEO and co-founder of ShoppingCartElite, the most sophisticated shopping cart platform on the market today. Find out more at http://www.shoppingcartelite.com/

- Phillip Lakin, VP of Operations, EduLocator.com

EduLocator Corp is an Online educational search engine, directory and reference website for current and potential students. The service focuses on giving students the best possible information about the educational landscape, informing them about pay-scale and job pathways, as well as several financing options such as Canada’s Second Career program.

This Mouse Move Heatmap of Edulocator's homepage shows what visitors are looking at!

Phillip Lakin, VP of Operations, started using ClickTale on the site 8 months ago “This was the first time we came across a service that would allow us to watch videos of our visitors’ mouse moves. When you work with the same landing page for a long time you become very used to it, and forget how to approach it as a first-time user. ClickTale gave us invaluable insights into our user’s actual behavior on our site.”

EduLocator used ClickTale along with Google Website Optimizer and their own internal A/B testing software. “Our bounce rate was significantly reduced. We realize the users were getting the wrong message from the page because they just weren’t scrolling. We split tested several new designs and they worked like a charm! Next we’re hoping to increase the confidence levels of student using our forms with ClickTale’s Form Analytics.”

These Link Analytics show how many visitors click on each of Edulocator's form fields.

“If you are planning to do any basic level of internet marketing that requires a self-run landing page, you MUST use ClickTale to ensure a market competitive level of user competency. Their pricing is extremely fair, the information is unbelievably valuable, it’s perfect for any size business, and is incredibly easy to use.”

The tools used by EduLocator are available to all our subscribers, so sign up today and learn how to optimize your website based on your customers’ actual behavior. Start increasing your conversion rates, minimizing your site abandonment, and maximizing your profits.