ClickTale Visitor Movies and Heatmaps

ClickTale is a great web-based program that allows you to actually watch what visitors do when they come to your website.

And yes, it's a little voyeuristic at first - like peering over someone's shoulder without their knowledge. But believe me, you'll get used to it very quickly!

Direct marketers had it hard in the days before the Web. Many smaller companies simply couldn't afford to perform direct mail testing or to put together customer focus groups.

Now, with the help of some recent free and low-cost services on the Web, the small business owner can draw on some incredibly powerful analytical tools to help them tune their websites for maximum conversion.

This article is going to look at a service called ClickTale. While ClickTale does have a free service (which is the subject of this review), its most powerful features are reserved when you subscribe as a monthly member.

I recommend you sign up for the free service and then, depending on the complexity of your needs, you can move on over to some of the more sophisticated subscription packages.

Watching Visitor Movies with ClickTale

To start recording and watching your site visitors, all you need to do is register and paste some JavaScript code into the page you wish to monitor. You must add the JavaScript code to each page you want to record.

Once you have the JavaScript installed, you simply log in and navigate to the Dashboard area to see your current stash of recordings. Below is what the main dashboard screen looks like.

Because the free version can record up to 100 user movies a week, the question is whether you'll have the time to watch them all. Fortunately, ClickTale provides many useful reports that help aggregate the data so that you can make smart decisions.

The below screenshot shows the actual visitor playback screen, where you can control movie playback, speed, and view basic analytical stats.

Let's take a brief look at the heat map feature.

Heat Maps - Visualize Your Visitors

A heat map is color-coded visual overlay that shows concentrations of some defined activity. High concentrations of the activity are coded one color, while lower concentrations are assigned other colors.

ClickTale's Attention Heat Maps are based on the location of the user's mouse pointer. The assumption is that a user's attention is typically close to where their mouse pointer is on the screen. Below is a screenshot showing a heat map overlay of my homepage along with some basic click stats.

ClickTale provides four basic types of heat maps. They are:

Attention Heat Map This heat map shows the areas of the web page that receive the most attention.

Total Time Heat Map This map shows the total time that all visitors were exposed to a specific web page area.

Visitors Heat Map This map shows the number and percentage of visitors that looked at every area of the page.

Page Views Heat Map Because any given visitor may come back and view the same landing page at some later time, this map shows the total number of page views recorded at every area of your web page.

ClickTale Analytics

Clicktale's analytics will provide you with the following information:

Basic demographics (country, language, browser, platform)
Pageviews per visitor
Mouse moves and mouse clicks per visitor
Javascript errors per pageview
Engagement time on page
Page load times

Of special note is the form analytics feature. This features allows you to see where visitors may be getting tripped up when filling out and submitting forms on your site.

Below is a picture of the form analytics funnel, showing the percentage of visitors that have passed defined steps in form completion and submission.

Summary and Conclusions

With so many great features available in the free version, there is really no reason why you shouldn't be testing out this great analytics package. My suggestion is for everyone to try out the free version and then, once you get your feet wet, you can decide if the extra features of the paid versions make sense for your organization.

Here's a summary of what you get in the free version.

Record up to 100 videos per week
Track a single domain or subdomain
Store recordings up to 30 days
Watch playback movie of the first two pages of a visitor session
See what areas of your page draw the most attention
See how far people scroll down your page
See how visitors interact with all links, forms, fields and buttons (data available only on your most popular page)

What are the drawbacks with the free version?

For one, you are limited to viewing just the first two pages of a visit. In addition, unless you upgrade to a paid plan, you will not be able to record secure HTTPS pages. This means you won't be able to watch your visitors on any secure shopping cart pages.

Paid versions of ClickTale are not cheap. This least expensive upgrade option will run you $99 per month. They do give quite a substantial discount of you purchase in increments of 6 months.

The paid upgrade provides more analytics, allows for the recording of more than 2 web pages per visit, and will record and monitor all secure content such as shopping cart transactions.

Here's a page showing the various ClickTale pricing options and features.

Understanding what visitors are actually doing on your sales page is a critical step to improving your page conversion rate. While ClickTale is not a substitute for Google Analytics or the Google Website Optimizer, it is a fabulous supplement to both these tools.

A great analytics program that I highly recommend!