ClickTale Archive

Here’s some startup news from across the Web:

Online video hosting service Kyte has announced the opening of two new offices, one in Central London and the other in Hamburg, Germany. From the announcement, Richard Cohen will lead the London office and Maks Giordano will lead the German expansion. The offices were setup to handle the current Kyte clients in each location but will also house sales teams to expand local operations.

As a side note, whatever happened to mobile live video? It seemed to be all the rage last year but the past few months I haven’t really heard much about the various companies in the space.

ClickTale is announcing today the launch of their Mouse Move Heatmap service. From the launch announcement, “By aggregating the mouse movements of hundreds visitors on a site, we create a comprehensive, visual representation of what visitors are looking at and focusing on within the page.” The mouse move heatmaps are available on all plans although limited on the free plan.

This week’s events in NYC:

• NYC Web Design Meetup
• Web2NewYork

If you read CN regularly, you know that I am an analytics nut. I’ve been interested in analytics since I was a baby playing with my Fisher-Price cash register. In the online space I like Clicky because they offer a real-time spy where you can sit and watch where your users and how they are interacting with your website.

Today analytics service ClickTale has upped the ante on real-time analytical monitoring with their own “Real-Time Monitor”. The ClickTale service provides a similar set of features to the Clicky real-time Spy product but adds additional functionality that monitor user’s mouse moves, clicks, scrolling and keystrokes.

Each user session is recorded and can be viewed as a video where you can watch exactly how the user interacted with your site or service. You can watch how users scroll, click, etc. This is pretty powerful stuff as it enables the ability to modify a site not just based on content but also with interactivity and location. It’s a great complement for any A/B testing plan.

The new Monitor service is free for all ClickTale plans including their free offering. ClickTale notes, “the Real-Time Monitor automatically refreshes itself every 10 seconds for our paid plan customers, and every 60 seconds for our free plan customers.”

Checkout all of our ClickTale coverage including why I think Omniture should acquire the analytics service.

We’ve reviewed a number of web usage analysis services including ClickTale, RobotReplay and CrazyEgg. We’ve also written about an analysis service named TapeFailure which was closed over a year ago. This week TapeFailure founder Joshua Gross has launched his new web analysis service named Vistrac which is a complete rewrite of TapeFailure plus more functionality and analysis.

Joshua notes, “This service (Vistrac) will analyze everything from where users click, to where they pay attention when scrolling. It takes the concept of sites like UserFly one step further and breaks down the data for you.”

The features page is worth a look for detailed info on what Vistrac provides. There are reports on browser type, OS, screen resolution and browser size. I’ve never seen browser size on a report before but it’s pretty interesting – this is where a user is using their browser at a size other than fullscreen. Other reports include link tracking, heat maps, scroll metrics and form metrics. For a startup, form analysis can mean more signups and more paying customers.

There’s also a Superfunnel report  which provides a map for each user and how they navigate through your website or application.

Vistrac pricing ranges from free to $149/month for a corporate plan. Most of the web analysis services offer a free trial. My suggestion is to give each of them a try on the same website, compare the results and move forward with the services you find beneficial.

Online business optimization software provider (that’s their tagline!) Omniture announced last week a number of new partners for their Genesis program. Omniture Genesis brings together analytics and online marketing tools together under one customer dashboard. It’s interesting to see Omniture in the news while I rarely ever hear about WebTrends anymore.

The list of new partners is interesting because many of them are startups we’ve covered here on CN. The new partner list includes:

• Brightcove (our coverage)
• ClickTale (our coverage)
• Keibi (our coverage)
• ShareThis (our coverage)
• Visible Technologies (our coverage)

It’s a smart move for the startups - they gain a bit of visibility and a good deal of distribution. Omniture has a wide reaching customer base worldwide and could provide a spark for each of the startups.

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.