ClickTale Archive

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.

The test was relatively simple. I used "seconds" to define whether the visitor would be part of the "modified" group. Odd, yes – even, no. Both groups saw the exact same article and same Web site. The only difference was the inclusion of a "name" box for the modified group which is shown below (it’s a mockup example). What this name box did was call out to the user "Hello!" and drew attention to it.

The box included the following elements:

• Welcome from x site
• Message about RSS with orange RSS icon
• Targeted ad

As for the specific ad types, gadget ads appear to work best for Digg visitors, while content ads worked better for Stumblers.

The great thing about what I setup is that only visitors from those sites saw the box. Many sites will run a "Welcome Digg’rs" type message when their story hits Digg but everyone will see that message. So not only are you not welcomed by name, you are welcomed by someone else’s name. I found that this tactic didn’t work as I had hoped over the past year.

My test has concluded and I am very pleased with the results. The next step is to refine the Welcome box and determine what it might look like going forward. Should every Digg user see it every time? Should a user be able to close it permanently? How far can I push it before I annoy the new visitor. It’s important to keep the brand and trust high.

As you can see a simple change returned dramatic results. And it has me wondering, who else can I welcome?

(tools used include: GetClicky, CrazyEgg, TapeFailure and ClickTale)

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.

Allen: Can you provide a brief background about yourself?

Tal: I am a technology entrepreneur and educator. Over the past few years, I have founded, mentored and advised several Israeli and US-based startups. In addition, I teach entrepreneurship at the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology. I enjoy learning new things, solving interesting problems, and working on projects that make a positive impact on people's lives.

Allen: What is ClickTale and where did the idea come from?

Tal: My co-founder and CTO, Arik Yavilevich, and I met at the Technion. Arik always wanted to understand what visitors were doing on his websites. He was frustrated by traditional web analytics that provide high level statistics and decided to find a better way to understand user behavior.

Arik and our R&D team developed our patent pending technology to give website owners the ability to watch movies of users' browsing sessions; every mouse movement, every click and every scrolling action can be recorded and watched as a movie. ClickTale also combines thousand of user sessions into meaningful reports of user behavior inside-the-webpage.

The ClickTale service is a continuous, worldwide, non-intrusive virtual usability lab and should be an indispensable part of every website and web application development cycle. By gaining a deeper understanding of visitor behavior, website owners can improve website usability, increase conversion rates, and easily discover errors and bugs.

Allen: How does the service work?

Tal: ClickTale is a hosted service, so no server software installation is needed and setup takes only a few minutes. Webmasters add a small amount of javascript code to their webpages. The javascript collects browsing data and transmits it to the ClickTale servers for processing. ClickTale creates movies of browsing sessions almost instantaneously and webmasters can log-in securely at anytime to view these movies.

Allen: Is ClickTale a replacement for the analytics software I use today or a complement?

Tal: We designed ClickTale to complement existing web analytics packages. Since ClickTale typically records a random subset of your daily visitors, you would still want to use an analytics package to track all your visitors' aggregate behavior.

Allen: You released a new version of the app today. Can you give us an overview of the new features?

Tal: We just released our new generation of ClickTale Heatmaps which include Link Analytics. The new Link Analytics deliver information that is not available anywhere else about the way website visitors interact with links. This information is combined with the Scrolling Map overlay to provide a full graphical representation of visitor behavior inside the page.

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 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.

To read more go to the ClickTale blog.

Allen: Any good stories to share of customers increasing revenue based on the changes they made from the ClickTale reports?

Tal: One of our customers, RestorationSOS.com, noticed within a few days of using ClickTale that there were many service requests made through their website than were never received by customer service reps. Seeing the recorded user requests and not receiving them, prompted an examination of the entire order processing system. The problem was narrowed down to a specific server and, as soon as that server was upgraded, service requests and revenues jumped by 35%. ClickTale turned out to be extremely valuable and had a huge impact on the bottom line of RestorationSOS.com.

There are many more stories. We already posted 4 case studies in our blog and a bunch more will be added in there near future. To read these go to: http://blog.clicktale.com/.

Allen: Who are your competitors?

Tal: We know of two companies that have some recording capabilities: TapeFailure and RobotReplay. As far as I know, neither provide heatmaps.

Allen: Do you have a monetization plan? If so, can you share some details? Are you funded?

Tal: 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 range from $19 to $99 per month and 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. More details are available at: http://www.clicktale.com/pricing.html.

Allen: What's coming in the next 3-6 months for ClickTale?

Tal: In the next 3-6 months we will continue to work hard to make ClickTale even better. We will add new and innovative reports that will provide our customers with additional insights and value. Stay tuned.

Allen: What's the Web market like in Israel?

Tal: There are many innovative Israeli Internet startups creating amazing products and services. The community is lively and meets regularly at large conferences, as well as at smaller gatherings.

Israel is a great place to start an Internet company because there are so many smart and creative people around. Here are some interesting facts:

• Israel has the highest number of scientists and engineers per capita in the world.
• Israel has the highest number of patents per capita in the world.
• Israel is blessed with the highest number of startups per capita in the world.
• There are more Israeli startups listed on the NASDAQ than any other country outside of North America.

I think you will be hearing about many more Internet startups coming out of Israel in the future.

Allen: Which RSS feeds are you reading these days?

Tal: Techcrunch, Paul Graham and Guy Kawasaki.

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.