Review of ClickTale and ClickTale adds heatmaps to their private beta

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...

ClickTale Review

Wikipedia describes ClickTale as "a qualitative web analytics service that provides a full-playback option for each user in the general statistics. Also, meta statistics allows playback experience of an artificially created "average user", or an "average user" that originated from a specific referral, thus enhancing webmaster's ability to optimize content per affiliation." And that is exactly what ClickTale does. Like TapeFailure - our review can be found here - it records all clicks, mousemovements and browses of your website visitors. All you need to do is paste a little JavaScript code somewhere on your webpage, decide how many recordings a day you want and wait.

Now that you had some visitors and recordings, you can go and analyze them. On the "My Projects" site you find all recordings for the last few days and some other data, like a demographics report with countries, languages, browsers and operating systems (92% of my users are using Windows and 40% Firefox 2). If you have selected a day you want to analyze, you find all recorded sessions on one list.

On this list you can see how many pages the user was visiting (the first row), what browser he used and from which country he was. You also see the referrer, the actual page, its loading time and the time the user was on this page. With the little play icon (that green arrow on the left) you start the ClickTale player. This is the tool that plays the user session.

The ClickTale Player

The interface is pretty simple. You have a start button, two buttons for the previous/next page the user visited and some more details. Inside the window you can follow the user from every mousemove to every click.

The icons on the right side explain the click behaviour of an user. A big blue square means the user clicked with the left mouse button, the green square means a right click.

Further you see the actual resolution the user had. So it might happen, that your user has a widescreen display but you don't. In that case you have to scroll horizontally to see everything. But this has of course its advantages as well: You can see what the user sees and what he doesn't. Maybe you have important information to low and the user has to scroll first. And if he scrolled and clicked you know the information is valuable for him. Maybe you should move it up a little bit? This and much more is possible with the ClickTale Player.

For Professional Use?

Do you know any software like ClickTale that you can install on your own servers? If so, use it. The player is pretty slow and you have to wait until it has loaded the next page the user visited. But for a quick look on how your users behave on your site this is a great tool. Maybe once the beta is complete, it will load more rapidly.

The Heatmap

Today, April 4th, ClickTale announced an new feature in their producht: Heatmap. This little extra shows exactly where the users spent the most time. This is different than what CrazyEgg does: CrazyEgg shows the clicks on your site elements, not the time the users was in an area.

The Pricing

ClickTale is currently in a closed beta. You can sign-up on their page and you might receive an invite.

The ClickTale team started a poll and forum post about their plans on pricing. These prices are not yet fixed (we can't publish them) but I think they are at a fair level. What would you pay for this service? Add it to the comments and please include how many domains you want to track and how many recordings you want to do per day.