ClickTale Blog

“Our business is all about taking care of our customers.  ClickTale has played a pivotal role in allowing us to do that better on our website.”

- Toby Hemmerling, Co-Founder and CEO
http://www.theorganicdish.com/

The Organic Dish is a unique service local to Boulder, CO. The company sells “dinner kits” or frozen organic meals that clients can cook and serve in their home within minutes. They also host cooking sessions wherein patrons may prepare their own meals from pre-cut, cleaned organic ingredients. This service may also be turned into a social event for ten or more adults. On their website, http://www.theorganicdish.com/, meals may be ordered from a menu and purchased. The site is also a great source of information about the way the business works. The business, launched in April of 2007, currently gets about 80 unique visitors per day. The average purchase made is about $150.

Toby Hemmerling, one of the co-founders of the operation, wears many hats, including that of CEO. He is very pleased with the services that ClickTale provides, especially being able to track his users’ paths through the website. He noticed immediately through the recordings and heatmaps that users had to do a lot of hunting before they could find the dinner menu– one of the primary reasons for visiting the site and also the route to the checkout page. Heatmaps also proved that most of his visitors were scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page to get to the info they needed. So Toby rearranged the navigational menu and contents based on his clients’ flow through the website. That way, he preserved the attention of those clients who were not as likely to hunt all the way to the bottom of the page to find what they were looking for.

Toby remembers originally reading about ClickTale’s free service on a blog, and thought it would be worth a try. “You hear a lot of people say that user testing is too complicated and expensive”, he says “but [ClickTale’s] recording really provides about 80% of what you get out of live user testing anyway.” Toby is looking forward to becoming a premium subscriber so that he may take advantage of being able to track users on secure pages.

It’s taken a year of hard work and studies — not to mention planning, fixing, monitoring, and improving– and the big day has finally come.
We couldn’t be prouder!

Graduating from a Beta and launching the service publicly is no small task, but we think we’ve done it with flying colors. We invite you to come and check out the accomplishments for yourself. The new ClickTale provides instantaneous signup with no need for an invitation. But that’s not all…

As ClickTale finally ventures out into the real world, we know you’ll be impressed by our new generation of heatmaps. In addition to “movie playback” and Scrolling heatmaps that ClickTale has always offered, today’s launch includes Heatmaps with Link Analytics.

 
Fig. 1: Heatmap showing an Advanced Details Pane over an Image Link

Link Analytics gives you an even more detailed analysis of your visitor’s interactions with your website; information not available anywhere else. Knowing the number of clicks each link generates is important, but combining that with how many people hovered over that link and you’re talking abut a serious degree of data. Still, it doesn’t end there. Link Analytics reports how many of those hovers eventually turn into clicks, how much time it took for a user to decide on a link, and more. Here are some of the new metrics you’ll have access to:

• Clicks, we count the number of clicks and the percent of the total clicks on every link.
• Visitors who Clicked are the number of unique visitors who clicked on a link as well as the fraction of total visitors.
• Hovers over Links, the number of mouse hovers over a link. This tells how attractive a link is to the visitor, but not necessarily attractive enough for a click.
• Hovers to Clicks, is the portion of mouse hovers that eventually convert into mouse clicks.
• Hesitation is the average time from beginning of a mouse hover to the moment of the mouse click.
• Hover Time is the average time mouse hovers over a link, indicating visitor interest level.
• Time to Click is the average time between the moment a page has been loaded to the moment a link is clicked. You can now discover which links are most attractive by seeing the average time it takes to click on them.
• Hover Order ranks the links by the average order in which they were hovered-over by visitors. Shows which links attract the mouse first, second and so on.    

Fig. 2: Heatmap showing an Advanced Details Pane over a Text Link

Subscribers have been raving about the new heatmaps. Christine Kayser, Marketing Analytics Coordinator at Lycos says “I love the new changes. Knowing how many hovered vs. how many clicked is excellent. Plus, being able to see items that are clickable that people aren’t clicking on is extremely helpful for our design team. The “Time to Click” data is fascinating.”

Jeff Pittelkow, Direct Marketing Specialist at Horizon Hobby says “The new heat map features are great! It gives us all the great information we need to accurately and wisely make decisions about our site. I think the hesitation feature is quite unique too. Also the hover, and hovers to clicks. I can’t think of anywhere you can actually see how many people hovered on a link and decided not to click on it; or for that matter, how long it took someone to click on it.”

Fig. 3: The Heatmap in Simple Mode

We’re offering a variety of pricing plans, the basic one– consisting of 100 recordings per week– continues to be free of charge.  Other plans offer increased recordings and advanced features such as e-mail support, advanced search capabilities, a longer recording history, SSL encryption, and the ability to record HTTPS pages.

We’re sure that you’re going to want to put the new ClickTale to work right away. In the meantime, we’re taking this commencement ceremony seriously: we’re already working on the next batch of features and improvements to offer you.

“Knowing how a user interacts with your website can be of enormous value!”

- T. Hambach, Founder
http://www.rotatingsignature.com/

A Google search for web analytics services brought T. Hambach to ClickTale.  While he has tried a number of other web analytics packages, he credits ClickTale with having isolated the quirks that would give his websites added functionality.

Hambach uses ClickTale on two of his sites — rotatingsignature.com, a service that offers forum users a means of randomly changing their signature every time they post, and babehq.net, an adult-content site. The two sites host a combined 1,450 visitors per day.  Through using the playback function over the period of a couple of months, Hambach began to understand his users and their needs in a different way. He reoriented his sites to reflect the way that users tend to navigate through them, which resulted in an increased number of pages visited.  “Knowing how a user interacts with your website can be of enormous value!” he enthuses.

Friends of Hambach have already signed up for ClickTale, based on his recommendation. He even recommended it to his employer, who has begun to use it too.

“I think every website should use ClickTale to improve usability and user experience. I already recommended this service to all of my colleagues!”

- Yuval Barkai, CEO
http://www.houseofseats.com/

HouseofSeats.com is a large web-based ticketing operation for sport, concert, and theatre tickets. They deliver tickets with a secure and easy purchase experience. Yuval Barkai, CEO of HouseofSeats.com, joined the ClickTale closed beta on May 14, 2007 and has benefited significantly from the service.

Mr. Barkai used ClickTale to watch hundreds of visitors browse his website. He noticed that visitors browse his site in an inefficient manner; when receiving ticket results, visitors tend to scroll down and then back up to change the ticket criteria. By adding the search criteria at the bottom of the results, HouseofSeats.com was able to reduce the number of round-trips inside the page.

Visitors tend to seek multiple events for the same team during a given sport season (football, basketball, etc). The ClickTale recordings revealed that visitors were having a hard time finding all the relevant tickets, as they were unable to be sorted by team. The website layout was redesigned to reflect this consumer need. It became more intuitive and easier to use. This simple change resulted in an increased conversion of 10% of team sports ticket purchases by visitors who might have otherwise given up their intended purchase because of a difficult search experience.

The changes initiated by Mr. Barkai and aided by ClickTale improved HouseofSeat.com’s usability, increased conversion rates, and turned browsing visitors into paying customers.

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 ;).

“ClickTale has allowed us to build a profile of our visitors that has shown us complexities we never knew existed. They are like the Sigmund Freud of the web analytics industry.”

- Ben Kuikman, Creative Marketing Specialist
http://www.pass-port.com/

Passport Software, Inc. specializes in business accounting software and serves over 10,000 customers through a network of 250 partners worldwide. Their current site, created about four years ago, is used mostly as an information portal for their distributors and end users.  It receives between 150 to 200 hits per day.

Ben Kuikman, Creative Marketing Specialist at Passport, first read about ClickTale through a review published on TechCrunch, a web 2.0 blog. He is currently running the ClickTale service on nearly twenty of his most visited pages. He found ClickTale’s setup to be an easy and a smooth experience. Although he has only been using ClickTale for a few weeks, it has already revealed some new information about his site; Surprisingly, the pathways that visitors use to navigate his site and the depth to which they browse proved to be much greater than he’d originally thought. More importantly, ClickTale’s heatmaps have shown him that 65 - 100% of his users –an unusually high amount–  actually scroll all the way to the bottom of his longer webpages. Heatmaps, he says, also have allowed him to see what sections are the most read on the page.

Although www.pass-port.com is not a site that engages in sales, Kuikman projects financial benefits from the use of ClickTale. The data gleaned from watching visitor movies, he explains, will save the company costly decision making time with the future redesign of their site as the evidence for the changes they need to make will be quite apparent from the footage. Robin Forde, marketing manager, says that the company intends to use ClickTale on the new site as well in order to monitor its navigability and usability.

ClickTale’s advantage, according to Kuikman, that it is “a qualitative kind of analysis which you don’t really get anywhere else. It’s a different perspective to see how those pages are browsed rather than that they are just places that people showed up on.”  He is also enthused by the surprises that ClickTale’s analytics reveal about the demographics of his viewers. Jokingly, he and Robin share that the higher the screen resolution of their users, the more tech savvy they seem to be. Passport, it seems, has derived all that they had bargained for as a result of using ClickTale– and a little extra to boot!

“Thanks to ClickTale I can watch my web users, and change the content and the graphics based on their moves”

-Johnny Vaccaro, Founder
http://www.panogames.com/ 

Video gamers in the market for a new vice are in for a treat when they come across one of Panogames.com’s 3D screenshots. Instead of viewing flat images of the game, potential buyers and industry insiders can have a taste of what it feels like to actually be in it. Panogames.com partners with such well-established game publishing companies as Atari and THQ. The site also serves as a hub for promoting the latest and greatest releases in the videogame world.

Panogames concentrates all of their ClickTale recordings on their homepage. They implemented the service after a site redesign in order to understand the impact of the changes they’d made. Founder of Panogames.com, Johnny Vaccaro, sees ClickTale as a replacement to usability testing with live participants. ClickTale revealed to him that a very small percentage of his users scroll down to the bottom of his page, thus never coming in contact with certain banners– a fault that he was easily able to remedy. He also noticed that most users don’t read the reviews posted on his site, preferring to just look at the images pictures and scan the titles. While Vaccaro does not use the demographics report provided by ClickTale, he does like seeing the referrer of each of his clients and thereby takes advantage of ClickTale’s detailed reports.

Vaccaro affirms that ClickTale is an ‘advanced usability testing tool’  He would definitely recommend it to friends.

Sometimes the wrapping paper is the best part of the gift. With this in mind, ClickTale has re-wrapped our site in a new design that is more usable and has a smoother look and feel. The gift to our users continues to be the free service that we offer, not to mention all of the goodies that we’ve added to the service this year such as heatmaps, SSL support, premium plans, and lots of ways to earn free recordings, such as our icon program.

Long-time users will have noticed that we’re not just a year older– we’re a year wiser. In the past twelve months, we’ve quashed countless bugs, and surpassed the one million-recording mark. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve graduated from Beta mode and are now in transition to becoming a public service (where every signup will result in an automatic account without having to wait for an invitation). Thanks to your helpful comments and feedback, our site has made steady progress since it’s inception in June, 2006.

ClickTale is growing up, and we encourage you to grow with us. Make sure to sign up now if you have not already done so to take advantage of our premium ‘invite only’ plan.

ClickTale was selected as one of the top 10 finalists in the TWS2007 Internet Startup Competition. The finalists, selected out of dozens of startups by some of Israel’s leading dotcom experts, earned the opportunity to present their product to a large crowd of internet enthusiasts and potential customers.

Here is the presentation made by the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickTale, Dr. Tal Schwartz. The speech was given on April 10, 2007.

In addition to the 9 other fascinating startup presentations, the conference featured speeches from Vice Prime Minister, Mr. Shimon Peres and Internet Guru, Dr. Yossi Vardi. The conference was organized by Yaron Orenstein and Yami Glick, founders of the.co.ils blog.

Today, we are officially announcing the release of the ClickTale Heatmaps, a brand new way to visually understand your website visitors’ browsing behavior. With the new Heatmaps, website owners can see where their website visitors look, what parts of the page they skip and how far down they scroll.

Fig. 1: Attention Heatmap

How does it Work?

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