Analytics Expert Blog

Come join us in San Fran, CA for Jim Stern’s internationally acclaimed eMetrics Marketing Summit and get a head start on your online campaigns! This is an entire event focusing purely on usability, conversion rates, and website performance!

Speakers scheduled to appear are some of the biggest and brightest in the industry including Bob Page of eBay, Steve Petitpas of Microsoft, Sharron J. Silva of the American Red Cross, and many others!

We’re giving away FREE and discounted tickets!! Make sure to Contact Us or comment below if you’re interested.

ClickTale and MailChimp are joining forces for a 30 minute webinar class that’ll walk you through the implementation and values of our new email tracking integration!

Learn how to successfully:

• Lead traffic to your website from your email campaigns.
• Understand what email subscribers are doing once they click through to your website.
• Target your email campaigns to specific visitor profiles.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EST

Register for Webinar Here

Email Tracking is a great addition to any usability test, allowing you to easily invite your current users to test new landing pages and receive immediate visual feedback. This webinar will help you jump-start your campaign analysis to get a more comprehensive understanding of how your email recipients are actually responding to your campaign efforts.

Make sure to stay on till the end, as there will be an expert Q&A session to answer any questions or curiosities you may have.

We look forward to hearing from you on-air

We’ve all been in this particular situation before, where you’re on one of your favorite websites and asked to complete a survey. On the one hand you want to share some feedback, but on the other, can you really be bothered?

You think for a moment and decide you’ll do it. So you start completing it, but after a minute or two, it gets complicated, seems like it’ll never end and you decide that your time would be better spent looking at photos of people you don’t even know on Facebook.

At ClickTale, we’re always interested in hearing what our customers have to say and one of the ways we listen is through surveys. So it dawned on us, wouldn’t it be great if we knew a little about the customer experience of someone actually filling them out. For example:

• Which questions were difficult for visitors to answer?
• Which questions prompted customers to abandon the survey altogether?
• Were customers navigating their way through the survey easily or did they have to look around to find the next step?

It was obvious! We needed to run ClickTale on our surveys! That way we could optimize them to ensure that they were as easy as they possibly could be. We got together with our friends at SurveyGizmo and are now proud to launch a brand new integration!

Just insert your ClickTale tracking code within their user-friendly interface and immediately start watching recordings of visitors completing your survey and analyze them with Form Analytics, Heatmaps and Conversion Funnels. For more information on this integration, visit our wiki.

We like it and we hope you will too!

About the Author

Jonny Steel is Director of Business Development at ClickTale, responsible for all partnerships, whether agencies or technology partners. With a background in e-commerce, he understands the desperate struggle websites face to understand what their customers are actually doing on the site. His main concern at ClickTale is developing a host of valuable integrations for our customers and ensuring that our valued partners are getting all the support they need. Jonny holds a law degree and MA in War Studies from Kings College, London.

Guest Post
By Dealer Dan

The Konami Code

My name is Dealer Dan. I’ve been an internet affiliate marketer since 1997, primarily focusing on the gambling field. Unfortunately over the years due largely to the US government, online gambling isn’t as lucrative as it once was. Therefore, I’ve been attempting to diversify outside the gambling niche.

Going into areas that I am not knowledgeable about would usually be hard to impossible. Unless you have a cheat code, or a game genie or gameshark to assist you. And that’s what I’ve got.

It’s called ClickTale.

Okay – so using ClickTale isn’t exactly cheating…but man, it sure feels like it at times. I only discovered ClickTale in 2007. I think back to the 10 years of internet marketing I did before that, and I wonder how I ever managed to run an affiliate website without it.

This article should give you some insight of just one example of how beneficial ClickTale can be, and what it can be used for.

Background

One of the websites that I launched late last year was DIY Landlord Forms. The premise of a website like this is simple: landlords create forms such as rental agreements. They fill in some fields like the property address, if the property has parking, payment options and rent amount etc – and then for $20 they are able to purchase a completed rental agreement form that they are able to print off and use as an official contract between them and the tenant.

Considering the same sort of form at a lawyers office could cost in excess of $200, this is obviously a big business. And a very competitive one as well. It’s not the sort of website you can throw up overnight and immediately start ranking high in Google for.

With so much competition for a new website, you rely solely on Google Adwords for traffic.

When it comes to getting traffic from Google Adwords the rules are fairly simple: earn more than you spend.

Now I’d say that approximately 1 in 20 clicks must purchase the form for us to break-even. We actually got off to a positive start, with 1 in 14 clicks on average purchasing the form.

But that still wasn’t good enough.

That means that 13 people who were visiting the website on our targeted keywords were not purchasing the form. And it was my job to find out why.

You look at the RAW data and what do you see? 14 people come to the website from all over the USA. 1 purchases. 13 don’t. Even worse, the majority of the visitors that are not purchasing leave the site after just 10 seconds.

What could be turning them off? Is there a browser issue? Do they not like the design of the website? Are we missing something that they require?

We tried various techniques. We added testimonials. We put more focus on testimonials. We removed testimonials! We made the header area smaller. We made it bigger. We changed logos. We tried a different colour scheme. We added live support. We sent a message to every new visitor.

Nothing seemed to work. We even removed EVERYTHING from the landing page except the form that they needed to fill in. So the landing page looked like this:

That’s when I decided to unleash my secret weapon: ClickTale.

Unleashing ClickTale

There are many options for you when it comes to using ClickTale. However your ultimate aim should be to have an end goal. People install Clicktale on their websites without really knowing what they are looking for. They just think “Cool, I can watch my visitors” but don’t take it any further than that.

Whenever you use ClickTale, you need to sit back and ask what goals you are trying to achieve with it. You may have added a new element to your website below the fold, and want to see how visible it is to your average visitor. Or you may be running split tests on a landing page, and want to see what attracts your visitor, what text they take the time to read and what text they skim through or skip altogether etc.

My end goal was simple: to determine why the 10 seconds or less visitors were leaving.

Analysis Process

So I pulled up 50 videos for that target group and I went through them one by one, making notes of what each visitor did. When you do that, you tend to notice a trend. The trend I noticed was a very simple one: 40 out of the 50 videos saw the visitor land on the homepage, scroll to the bottom and then leave the site.

Once I had this trend, I went back to all of the video archives to see if this differed depending on any of the design changes that we implemented. Again, I noticed the very same trend – many visitors were scrolling down to the bottom of the site, and then leaving.

Now you may think it was overkill to watch so many videos – but one thing you can never do is jump to conclusions. You need to sit down and analyze as much data as you can. Thankfully, ClickTale makes this extremely easy to do.

Using this video data, I was able to determine that the visitors were turned off by the length of the form. I watched them hit “page down” 4-5 different times until they got to the end of the form, and then they left. Matching that up with the keywords, it was easy to see that they were overwhelmed by the length of the form.

So we changed it up. When we started the site, we wanted to make it as user-friendly as possible. We had a “help” section explaining everything that the user would fill in. We had lots of space. It looked pretty!

But thanks to ClickTale, we knew it wasn’t what the user wanted. So we changed the form. Check it out here below.

Web Form Redesign

We reduced the size of the form by over 80%, going with a checklist style. Look at the forms side by side:

Both of those screenshots were taken based on what my resolution could see when I landed on the form. As you can see, there is a huge difference in what you can see in the old layout compared to the new layout:

All it took was about 20 minutes of work changing the CSS and layout slightly.

For our target keywords, our sales went up from 1 in 14 sales to 1 in 7 sales almost immediately.

And it was all thanks to ClickTale.

ClickTale is by far one of the most valuable internet marketing tools a webmaster can have. You just have to understand how to use it, and always make sure that when you are watching videos, you have some sort of purpose to it.

Now if you don’t mind, I have to brew a pot of tea and see what I can do to get those 6 other visitors to convert…

About the Author

Dealer Dan has been an affiliate marketer since 1997, and runs his own Affiliate Guide website. Just remember if you visit – he’ll be watching you.

We’ve just opened up ClickTale’s Research Hub, customized to meet all your ebusiness needs. Here, you can gain free access to our latest reference guides, whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, and much more to keep your website customer experience current and converting.

Popular content featured in our Research Hub includes:

• In-depth Industry Whitepapers

• Master Class Webinar Series

• Comprehensive Case Studies

• Expert Q&A Sessions

• And much more!

Discover unique approaches and useful insights to get ahead of your online optimization process. This includes everything from web analytics and emarketing, to usability and design.

Winter conferences are here and we’re already bundled up to go on the road! Whether you are a new ClickTale customer, seasoned ClickTale nerd, or simply a conversion enthusiast, we want to meet you. Have a look at where we’re headed and hopefully we’ll see you at a conference hall near you!

IRWD, Orlando, February 13th -15th

We’re escaping to the warm weather in Orlando, Florida for the Internet Retailer 2012 Conference. 46 expert speakers, 27 conference sessions, 50 exhibits, and 24 consultants all at one conference! Get a free design consultation on your own website! Keynote speakers include Paul Miller from W.W. Grainer Inc, Thomas Ryan, of Threadless.com, Halley Silver, Director of Online Services, King Arther Flour, plus many more.

If you are interested in going, we’re hooking you up with a 25% discount on all passes purchased, with no limit as to how many people register with the discount code. Contact us or comment below for the code!

eMetrics 2012, San Francisco, March 4th-9th

Check us out in San Fran, CA for Jim Stern’s internationally acclaimed eMetrics Marketing Summit and get a head start on your online campaigns! This is an entire event focusing purely on usability, conversion rates, and website performance! Speakers scheduled to appear are some of the biggest and brightest in the industry including Bob Page of eBay, Steve Petitpas of Microsoft, Sharron J. Silva of the American Red Cross, and many others!

We’re giving away discounted tickets, so contact us for more details!

Omniture Summit, Salt Lake City, March 19th-23rd

This Digital Marketing Summit is home to over 1,000 digital marketing, ecommerce and web analytics professionals. Join us at the premier digital marketers event to gain insights into industry specific business challenges and money making best practices. Keynote speakers include the likes of Steve Parker, Jr., Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Levelwing.

Internet Retailing Expo, Birmingham, March 21st-22nd

We conclude our winter conferences in England, where we’re attending the Internet Retailing Expo in Birmingham. Over 150 leading suppliers of ecommerce and multichannel retailers will be there and it’s completely FREE to attend! Get in on all the conference, workshop and expo action, geared specifically towards multichannel online retailers.

Be in Touch!

If you’re going to be at any of these events, let us know! We’d really love to arrange a time to chat or meet up at our booth. Feel free to contact us directly or comment below if you know you are going to be around. Hopefully see you soon!

This past holiday season, Cyber Monday became the single top spending day in history, raking in an impressive $1.25 billion. Little by little ebusinesses are doing their homework, getting a deeper look into the online customer experience, improving site navigation, optimizing online forms, and paying attention to usability and optimal design. Round of applause, please.

Yes, yes, this is all very well and good. But, each new year triggers new web standards and design trends, and 2012 is no different.

Over the past year, ClickTale has worked with and helped an elite group of etravel heavy weights, to get ready for the influx of holiday travel visitor traffic. After gathering over 23 million visitor recordings of data during this time, we have documented, defined, and now we deliver a powerful knowledge base of actionable steps to improve your own site’s performance for 2012 in our Online Travel Best Practices Whitepaper.

For your own free copy of our Online Travel Best Practices, just click HERE.

Website Resolution Countdown

Below, I count down my 7 favorite whitepaper takeaways that can apply to any ebusiness New Year’s resolutions, in any industry.

7. Visualize your visitor data rather than simply collecting it in a vacuum.

Numbers are great for quick data and structured reporting. But numbers can’t explain the customer experience on your site. Heatmaps, conversion funnels, and visitor recordings are all great visual tools that let you observe visitor behavior on your website as it happens.

6. Understand how many search results your visitors are willing to scroll through on a webpage.

**The average visitor only scrolls through 10 search results.

5. Know the difference between your different website visitors. (especially for ecommerce)

a. The Hesitant/Cautious shopper (Just wants to contact you)
b. The Comparison Shopper (Wants the best deal)
c. The Determined Shopper (Just wants to shop)

4. Research your most popular keywords that should be used in your ad word campaigns to effectively structure your paths to conversion from one landing page to the next.

Use segmentation features to break down your visitors and narrow down specific customer profiles.

3. Do not let visitors who arrive from a Google search results page land on another search page on your site.

This will just overwhelm them and send them bouncing.

2. If visitors are quitting in the middle of the form, then you will need to know at which specific fields they are quitting and why to improve conversions.

Form Analytics highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each field, while finding form errors in the process.

And, drumroll, please…

1. Be your own website.

While it is good to learn from the successes of other popular websites, their design might not work in the favor of your own site usability. Popular webpage elements can be placed in altering locations on the page. By analyzing your own visitors’ behavior, you will know which layout works best for your website to encourage conversions.

To read and learn more, see our Online Travel Whitepaper.

We want to hear from you!

Tweet us your thoughts @ClickTale. Let us know what you think and how ClickTale’s guide has helped you with your own website!

Each test version during your a/b testing needs to be an accurate reflection of how users interact with your website. So, instead of going through tens of unnecessary test versions created purely from intuition, save yourself time (and frustration) by visually understanding your visitors’ online behavior.

Visual reporting of the online user experience for a/b testing is best achieved using accessible and easy to use Customer Experience Analytics tools and solutions.

ClickTale’s Guide to A/B Testing – Intuitive Testing with Behavioral Data, clearly explains what to test, how to test, and what to change on your website. Learn how to:

• Use ClickTale to find pages and elements to test

• Set up your own a/b test

• Analyze your test results

• And gain more ideas for testing

The best part…it’s FREE.

Download HERE!

NEW! If you want to get more information and a wider selection of media guides, sign up to ClickTale’s Research Hub. Here you’ll find our latest reference guides, whitepapers, ebooks, webinars, and much more to keep your website customer experience current and converting.

ClickTale is now en Español!

Due to popular demand, ClickTale is now expanding into the Spanish language market, catering to our growing international clientele. We are proud to announce that our new Spanish blog is our first multilingual release.

Here, ClickTale has created a one-stop knowledge hub for everything web analytics, emarketing, usability and design…entirely for Spanish speakers. Although the web analytics industry is continually growing, access to multilingual advanced research and quality data can be hard to come by, especially when discussing cutting edge technology such as Customer Experience Analytics.

ClickTale’s already begun translating and publishing our same dynamic content into Spanish, including research, case studies, and whitepapers, for your own business use.

Please leave us your comments or questions regarding content you wish to see in Spanish.

ClickTale is sponsoring its very own Tweet and Win contest!

How to play: Simply tweet

World-leading user behavior analytics offers free accounts #ClickTale

Continue tweeting right up until the end of the contest. The more you tweet, the higher your chances are to win!

What you win: A six month ClickTale Silver Account…FREE!!

So, start tweeting and may the best tweeter win!