July 10, 2007 at 5:53 pm by ClickTale
· Filed under Case Study
“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.”
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!
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.
June 17, 2007 at 4:16 pm by ClickTale
· Filed under Announcements
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.
May 14, 2007 at 6:08 am by Arik & Tal
· Filed under Announcements
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.
April 3, 2007 at 5:34 am by Arik & Tal
· Filed under Announcements
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.
February 6, 2007 at 5:52 pm by Arik & Tal
· Filed under Announcements
We have finally finished going over all the submissions that we have received in the past month. Great stuff! There were some really unique submissions, as well as many similar ones. We chose five (5) submissions based on their creativity, value and practicality to be the official contest winners.
The judging was not objective, so don’t worry if your idea was not selected as one of the winners. As promised, the winners will receive VIP accounts. In addition, we have decided to send regular invitations to the ClickTale service to all of you who have submitted a meaningful idea. Thank you for participating!
And now to the winners:
Stephen Wald from www.ipodxtras.com - for an idea about mouse movement analysis.
Adam Lewis from www.rubberstampingfun.com – for an idea about page entry/exit analysis and advanced filtering.
January 11, 2007 at 5:55 pm by Arik & Tal
· Filed under Announcements
Update: The Contest is now officially Closed (February 1, 2007). We received over 100 entries and we plan to review them carefully over the next few days. We will inform the winners later this month.
Today, we would like to announce the launch of ClickTale’s Crazy Web Analytics Contest, your opportunity to get the web analytics you always wanted. We are opening up this competition to give you an opportunity to sound your voice and tell us the type of information you always wanted to know about your web visitors.
Specifically, imagine you could track thousands of visitors and millions of page events. How would you aggregate this information? What kind of statistics would be useful to you? What types of reports or visual maps would you like to see?
We will pick the best ideas and work with the winners to make their dreams become a reality. The winners will be awarded with VIP Beta Accounts which includes an invitation to join the ClickTale beta program immediately without waiting for their turn, as well as access to specially-made custom reports.
ClickTale collects data about every mouse position coordinate and timing, every mouse click coordinate and type, every scrolling action, and every keyboard key entry. How would you aggregate all this data? Here are some ideas that may inspire you:
A report analyzing where the page fold is located.
A report indicating how visitors are resizing their browsers upon arriving at a website.
A heat map of visitor attention based on scroll-bar location.
A heat map of mouse clicks.
A visual map of average mouse movements across a webpage.
Statistical clustering of users based on behavior attributes and displaying a representative user from each group.
January 9, 2007 at 7:46 pm by Arik & Tal
· Filed under Announcements
A lot of people have been asking us if we have a demo.
Today we are proud to announce the first official Screencast of ClickTale in action.
And, if you are curious to see more, here is another movie.
There have also been some unofficial movies made by our users. One with Chinese BubblePLY commentary and another that was made by the Spanish site online.com.es.
December 23, 2006 at 4:55 pm by Arik & Tal
· Filed under Research
Note:Since posting the data in this article, we have collected and analyzed much more detailed information regarding scrolling behavior of visitors. The research below reveals information about the location of the fold as well as some basic information about visitors’ scrolling behavior.
For more advanced research about statistical models for page scrolling behavior and visitor attention at each point in the page, please see the more recent research we have published in 2007 (ClickTale Scrolling Research Report V2.0 - part 1 and part 2).
Web designers and usability professionals have debated the topic of web page scrolling since 1994. At the early days of the web, most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling and it was not a natural thing for them to do. As a result, web designers would design web pages so that all the important content would be “Above the fold” or even worse, squeeze the entire page into the initial screen area. This practice of “squeezing” continues even today.
Nowadays, scrolling has become a natural practice in surfing the web. Scrolling is also associated with web 2.0 design because big, clear text and “spacious”, “clean” content implies longer web pages.
In this post, we will demonstrate with charts and real data several behavioral patterns related to scrolling. Let’s start!
December 3, 2006 at 9:17 pm by Arik
· Filed under Research
Today I have decided to study the relationship between browsers, countries and browsing speed. For starters, let me explain how ClickTale measures browsing speed.
What we do is measure the time (in milliseconds) it takes to load the HTML (the DOM) for each page-view as well as the time it takes to load the entire page. The reason there are two separate parameters is that browsers usually continue loading images and other external resource some time after the entire HTML is loaded. We provide this load time data to our subscribers as part of the ClickTale service.
