ClickTale

If you've been reading CN for a while, you know we like ClickTale. We said that Omniture should acquire the service and we've also interviewed the ClickTale CEO, Tal Schwartz. ClickTale is basically a worldwide virtual usability lab for your Web site, application, ecommerce site or blog.

Today the company is launching a new product -- Form Analytics. Over my career I've seen several products do something similar but not to the scale that ClickTale is. From the ClickTale blog, "Form Analytics reveals how visitors interact with online forms and provides recommendations that can increase shopping cart conversion, form completion rates and reduce visitor abandonment."

Form Analytics is currently in beta and includes three reports: Time, Blanks, and Refills. Tal tells me that additional reports will be coming out soon. The Time report shows you how long people are spending on your forms. It gets even crazier with the Advanced Time report which shows you how much time was spent with each individual field. Blanks provides you with details on which fields users are leaving blank when submitting a form. And lastly, the Refills report provides details on how often a user is forced to redo some part of their entered data.

Based on their initial testing, they've seen two common errors that developers and content creators are making. One is around ZIP codes and not taking into account non-U.S. postal codes. The other is password fields which don't provide any specifics on the type of password required which forces the user to refill the form.

My hope is that they provide regular blog posts with more form analytics data - optimizing your forms can return huge value and they could offer excellent guidance with the aggregated data.

After last year's acquisition post, I thought it would be interesting to look at 5 great acquisition targets for 1st quarter 2008. I do not have financials for any of these companies, so I am working from a base of technology and visibility. For each company I list, I have also listed a possible buyer along with my commentary on why the purchase makes sense. Do you agree or disagree?

AOL

Buyer: Yahoo

Why: Yahoo needs to expand its base of distribution for the Yahoo ad platform. What better way than to acquire the population segment who uses AOL and loves it? AOL users click ads which means a potential cash win for Yahoo sa they could integrate contextually-relevant advertising into AOL, something AOL doesn't do currently. It would also give them access into Hulu thru the AOL Video portal. It might even perk up the employee morale which I read has been quite low this past year.

Zoho

Buyer: IBM

Why: A couple times each week I read about IBM wanting to own the services market. Acquiring Zoho would give IBM a foothold into Web 2.0 and since Zoho targets the small business, would give IBM a chance to sell the small business on even more IBM-based services. It could even help IBM to slowly become a household name again in the Web space, something that they have no real presence in today.

Clicky

Buyer: Webtrends

Why: Webtrends is so completely out of the Web game, it's sad. I remember beta testing the first version of Webtrends in the mid-90s and watched the company never move forward. Clicky is hot, both from the application-side and the buzz-side, and could be a good fit for Webtrends. Most small businesses need simple Web analytics and while Clicky is more robust than just simple, it would give a slow entry into the current Web market for Webtrends. That is of course if they actually want to move forward, something I've wondered for eight years now.

CrazyEgg/ClickTale

Buyer: Omniture

Why: To help Omniture move further into the Web testing market and provide a rounded suite of tools for their clients. Last year I said that CrazyEgg should be acquired by a large creative agency but I've changed my mind and am going with Omniture. CrazyEgg and ClickTale provide the testing and Omniture provides the analytics - I could see some nice A/B type testing with these acquisitions.

Pageflakes/Netvibes

Buyer: Yahoo

Why: Both Pageflakes and Netvibes have good footings into the early adopter, "cool techie" segments. This is a segment which Yahoo lacks on but could be a very influential segment for buzz. Completed correctly, Yahoo could (once again) start to get their search and other products in front of the early adopter, blogger crowd which can be an excellent way for Yahoo to get messages out and have forced use of their technology.

Note: Zoho is a current sponsor of CN.

ClickTale is announcing today that it has secured funding from YL Ventures, a boutique European venture capital firm. ClickTale is the first to use the term "Web Interaction Analytics" and whose service enables websites to record and watch movies of their users' browsing sessions, will use the proceeds of the funding round to expand the sales and the feature set of their hosted service. Amount of the round was not disclosed.

YL Ventures' Managing Partner, Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf, will be joining the ClickTale board of directors as part of this funding round.

ClickTale allows you to watch what your users do on your site, every mouse movement, every click and every scrolling action, as if it was a real focus group. We reviewed ClickTale when they launched the beta in April and you can read our interview with Founder Tal Schwartz. I've used ClickTale several times and find it to be very informative and can help you see flaws and quickly get to the optimum setup.

In other ClickTale news, they just released their Scrolling Research Report V2.0 - Part 2: Visitor Attention and Web Page Exposure on the ClickTale Blog. There is a ton of data and information in the report but here are the net take-aways:

• The most valuable web page real-estate is located near the page top, between 0 and 800 pixels. Visitor Attention and Page Exposure peak at about the 540 pixel-line.
• If you have a long web page, add “stop points” such as headers and images to prevent your visitors from quickly scrolling down the page. It will prevent their attention from waning towards the end of the page.
• The footer of your page is important! Users do pay quite a bit of attention to that area of your page.

Has one of your stories hit the front page on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc? What I find is that the traffic from these social sites is great (some sites live off this traffic) but the conversion is horrible. Many speak about the way these users spend less than one second on a site and do nothing on the site itself. No RSS pickup, no ad clicks, nothing, a pack of sheep moving from site to site. This is frustrating for me as a marketer -- all of these visitors and no real way to capitalize on them. Even if they would just take my RSS feed for a day, I would consider that a win. A click on an advertisement would be gold - not because I might pick up a few cents but because my sponsors would see a higher rate of return and my visitors would learn about these services (which I handpick).

I decided to change the game for some of these social visitors. I spent a good bit of time analyzing exactly what these users do when they visit CN. And the results were sad. Visit the page, leave. Over and over I saw this pattern thousands of times. In my new test group, users clicked the ads an average of 7% more and picked up the CN feed 12% more than in the non-modified group. I consider that a huge gain. The key is a simple thing I learned early in my career as a salesman at The Wiz. Welcoming someone by name will increase the likelyhood of a purchase. A person's name is the most beautiful sound they can hear. In this case, I used the referring social media site as their name.

Continues inside »

The team at ClickTale have released a report from data they gathered from users of the ClickTale service. It would be great if other services such as TapeFailure and CrazyEgg did the same thing. As long as the data is not identified down to the individual service user, this type of data can do two important things: teach us about trends and sell their service! The report provided by ClickTale is very detailed and is a great selling point for why you should be using ClickTale.

The report released today discusses amount of scrolling a site visitor is willing to process. What would be great is to know what type of sites make up the report. For example, people might be more willing to scroll further on a blog than on a product site or a corporate brochure, etc. Most blogs seem to have a good bit of scrolling, especially on the home page.

A few of the interesting conclusions from the Scrolling Report:

• Almost identical percentages of page views (15%-20%) reach the page bottom regardless of page height.
• It appears that regardless of page height, scrolling reach is very similar on the relative scale with some resemblance to a linear model (or a very flat exponential): between 64% to 68% of the page views are likely to reach the 1K pixel line and 15% to 20% will reach the bottom of the page.
• It appears that visitors scroll in a relative way - about the same percentage of page views will reach the middle of a web page regardless of the actual page height in pixels.

Do you believe that blogs have changed the way we scroll on a Web page? From the old days where the belief was to fit as much as possible on the first screen, I would say they have. Check out our previous ClickTale coverage.

We reviewed ClickTale earlier this year when they moved into a private beta. It's a pretty groovy testing app in the same category with TapeFailure and CrazyEgg. Mashable has a great overview of the updated product. I asked Tal Schwartz, ClickTale Founder, for an interview to learn more about ClickTale and he was kind enough to jump away from the launch madness to answer my questions and our chat log is provided below. His answer regarding Israeli startups is fascinating.

Please come inside for the full interview transcript!

Over the past week, we reviewed a new mouse tracking application named TapeFailure. This app has received loads of praise around the Internet even though it is still in a private beta. We gave away all of our private beta keys in minutes of posting the note.

On Saturday, Corsin sent me a review of another semi-new application, also in private beta, called ClickTale. Just as I am about to post it, ClickTale founder Tal Schwartz sent me an embargoed press release through today including some information about their new heatmaps which went live today. I am going to try to get some beta keys and will let you know if I am able to.

A few people have asked me if this is better than Crazy Egg. These heatmaps are a bit different than the ones on CrazyEgg. ClickTale's heatmaps produce their charts based on mouse movement and page activity while CrazyEgg maps based on clicks.

Tal discusses three major benefits for using ClickTale's heatmap technology: Optimize advertising location and increase its impact, Maximize content effectiveness by rearranging its location, and Reduce webpage abandonment rates.

I asked Corsin to update his review of ClickTale to include the heatmaps. It took me a while to convince him and let's just say that he is now on a first class flight to NYC. Of course I didn't buy him the return (oh well).

Corsin's review follows...