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Education in Usability – EduLocator’s Experience
“ClickTale Rocks! The ability to gain perspective from so many angles of user interaction within our website has given us a definite edge over our competition”
- Phillip Lakin, VP of Operations, EduLocator.com
EduLocator Corp is an Online educational search engine, directory and reference website for current and potential students. The service focuses on giving students the best possible information about the educational landscape, informing them about pay-scale and job pathways, as well as several financing options such as Canada’s Second Career program.
This Mouse Move Heatmap of Edulocator's homepage shows what visitors are looking at!
Phillip Lakin, VP of Operations, started using ClickTale on the site 8 months ago “This was the first time we came across a service that would allow us to watch videos of our visitors’ mouse moves. When you work with the same landing page for a long time you become very used to it, and forget how to approach it as a first-time user. ClickTale gave us invaluable insights into our user’s actual behavior on our site.”
EduLocator used ClickTale along with Google Website Optimizer and their own internal A/B testing software. “Our bounce rate was significantly reduced. We realize the users were getting the wrong message from the page because they just weren’t scrolling. We split tested several new designs and they worked like a charm! Next we’re hoping to increase the confidence levels of student using our forms with ClickTale’s Form Analytics.”
These Link Analytics show how many visitors click on each of Edulocator's form fields.
“If you are planning to do any basic level of internet marketing that requires a self-run landing page, you MUST use ClickTale to ensure a market competitive level of user competency. Their pricing is extremely fair, the information is unbelievably valuable, it’s perfect for any size business, and is incredibly easy to use.”
The tools used by EduLocator are available to all our subscribers, so sign up today and learn how to optimize your website based on your customers’ actual behavior. Start increasing your conversion rates, minimizing your site abandonment, and maximizing your profits.
Take your email marketing to the next level
ClickTale and Silverpop – Providing clients with incredible new insights into customer behavior
We are incredibly excited to announce our new partnership with Silverpop, a leading provider of email marketing solutions specifically tailored to the unique needs of B2C and B2B marketers. Together, we will help our customers effectively track their consumers’ online behaviour, improve the effectiveness of their campaigns and ensure the maximum ROI for the minimum effort.
This partnership comes as marketers continue to shift more of their budgets toward email marketing channels while the need for effective measurement tools continues to grow. A recent Silverpop survey found that 4 out of 10 marketers will increase their email budgets in 2010 and a May 2009 Forrester report indicated that U.S. businesses will spend $953 million dollars on Web analytics software in the next five years.
This new partnership will deliver both qualitative and quantitative statistics that will help our customers gather in-depth, relevant information about their email subscribers. ClickTale and Silverpop customers will be granted an unparalleled view of their subscribers’ behavior and consumer trends, with the ability to drill down to specific subscribers based on any business process and even watch individual browsing sessions.
Silverpop's clean and simple Clicktale integration page.
“Silverpop recognizes that its customers are focused on optimizing performance and demonstrating ROI, so we partner with companies that make this possible in ways that are effective, efficient and unique,” said Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey. “We are pleased to help our customers easily include their email marketing programs into their ClickTale reports, allowing for the delivery of the right message at the right time and the development of deeper and more relevant relationships with their customers.”
“We are looking forward to offering Silverpop’s extensive client base easy access to our unique optimization tools,” said Dr. Tal Schwartz, co-founder and CEO of ClickTale. “These savvy email marketers understand the vital role effective analytics plays in a successful email marketing program. Now, they will be able to take behavioral analysis to a whole new level and obtain an incredibly clear understanding of what works and what does not.”
This integration is now available to anyone who has both a paid ClickTale and Silverpop account, so sign up to ClickTale to take advantage of these amazing new tools today. We believe this new integration, as well as our visual heatmaps, conversion analytics and full video playback of your visitors browsing sessions make ClickTale the perfect complement to your traditional web analytics suite.
ClickTale on ClickTale.com
For those of you who haven’t visited ClickTale.com in a while, now’s a great time to try it out, as we’ve completely overhauled our entire site. We’ve cleaned out and freshened up everything, from our homepage design and demo movie to the site navigation and a new product tour.
Simply put, we’ve gone from this:
To this:
We’ve added a new resource section to our homepage, with links to video testimonials, our new wiki and Quick Start Guide. The live chat button in the top corner of every page of our site will let you get an instant response from one of our product specialists. We’ve also created an extensive product tour with a full page detailing each one of our main features.
What’s more, we’re taking this opportunity to put our money where our mouth is. Over the next few weeks and months we’re going to be using our own site as the ultimate ClickTale case study. We’ll be documenting all the changes we make to our site here on our blog, and invite you to watch our process of site optimization every step of the way.
But for now we wanted to give you a taste of what’s to come. So to start off, here is a mouse move heatmap of the upper part of our old site.
As you can see, most returning visitors went to the “Sign in” button, but new visitors did not really use the navigational menu, and our “Special Offer” call-to-action button got little or no attention. Now let’s compare that to a heatmap of our new site.
Even after just 24 hours, the difference is clear! While we still see a lot of visitors going to the “Sign in” button, new visitors now use the navigation bar to get around our site. This gets people to where they want to go faster and is a great sign of site usability. In addition, our two new call-to-action buttons, “Play Video” and “Plans & Pricing” get a lot more healthy attention.
We’ll be posting every few weeks as our new site evolves, showing you exactly how we’re optimizing our site and improving its usability and conversion rate. You can do the same by signing up for a free account now and learn how to optimize your own website based on your customers’ actual browsing behavior.
Plug In with ClickTale
As promised, we’ve been working on the wiki night and day and have finally finished the plug-ins section! We’ve created brand new documentation for each and every one of our plugins, as well as providing the full source code and examples of use for each one.
The full list contains over 35 plugins, including some brand new ones we haven’t told you about yet. These include plugins for Yahoo! Store pages, eBay’s ProStores pages, Zend Framework pages, Ruby on Rails and a whole lot more.
We even have five great new Google products integrations, with plugins for Google AdWords, AdSense, Maps, SEO and most importantly Google Website Optimizer. This last plugin will allow you to seamlessly track and record your visitors while A/B testing your webpages, allowing for in depth testing like never before. We will be talking more about extensive A/B testing with Google Website Optimizer over the next couple of weeks.
The full list and all the documentation can be found at http://wiki.clicktale.com/Article/Plugins. As always, our Wiki is only going to be as useful as the community that creates and shapes it, so feel free to add, edit and contribute as you see fit.
We believe our wide range of plugins, as well as our heatmaps, behavioral analytics and full video playback make ClickTale the perfect complement to your traditional web analytics suite. Sign up today and start learning how to optimize your website based on your customers’ actual behavior, no-matter what platform you’re using!
ClickTale Wiki
Today we’re launching the new ClickTale Wiki, a comprehensive knowledge base about all things ClickTale, written by our users, for our users. Although there are already a couple of hundred pages, we’re just getting started. In the next few days and weeks this Wiki will become the first port of call for any ClickTale questions or support issues you may have.
The Wiki will contain how-to guides for all of our features, a full troubleshooting section and a repository of all our plugins, modules and integration guides. It’s also going to be open to the general public to contribute their own content, so feel free to join in. You can write about ClickTale features, give examples of how you’ve used ClickTale, or just talk about website optimization and usability in general.
The Wiki can be found at http://wiki.clicktale.com/. You can check out brand new pages as they are created, and feel free to request a page you think should be added. Our Wiki is only going to be as useful as the community that creates and shapes it, so pull up a chair. Make yourself at home.
ClickTale’s Holiday Give-Away Winners
We’ve had an incredible amount of heatmaps sent to us over the last two weeks, and the quality of the entries this year has been exceptional. With such a wide range to choose from, it was really hard to pick the winners, but after much deliberation we were able to choose our favourites.
We’ve asked a few of our conversion analysts, who usually work with our enterprise clients, to give us their opinions. You can see their comments below, showing how the layout and design of these sites can be further improved to boost conversion rates.
Click on the images below to see the full heatmaps:
First Prize – Michael Kjeldsen, Bartendermagasinet.dk
| “I’ve managed to raise conversions on my site by nearly 300%. Which is gooooood  ” |
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Our experts say: The actionable information we can glean from this heatmap is amazing! We can clearly see the hottest area is the list of ingredients, which is very important to the readers. Placing an ad or Call to Action button in the empty space to the right of this area could greatly increase its click-through rate.
The right hand sidebar gets little or no attention, especially the adverts on the far right. Instead of having two right sidebars we would recommend splitting these into a left and right sidebar to bring the content closer to the action. Also, we can see that most people skip to the end of the embedded video, which tells us it needs to be shorter in order to be effective.
Second prize – Phillip Lakin, Edulocator.com
| “We were able to increase our conversion rates, and lowered our bounce rate by over 20%!” |  |
Our experts say: We can see that people pay attention to the bottom half of the page with the big red Call to Action buttons, and ignore the information at the top. As this page appears after the conversion takes place, the “Here’s your info” button, which gets a lot of hovers, could be used to cross promote another product or site instead, bringing in some additional revenue from converted customers.
Also, the phone number in the top right corner gets almost no hovers, while the smaller one in the lower middle gets a lot of hovers. This tells us that people only focus on the lower halfof this page, and we would recommend moving any important content further down to increase its noticeability.
Third prize – Nadia Kerr, DigiGifts.com.au
| “ClickTale has provided us with valuable information on how visitors interact with our website design, layout and functionality” |  |
Our experts say: The first thing we can clearly see here is that no-one goes bellow the fold. This is because there is no content or images that cross over the fold-line, so customers have no reason to think there is content below.
Additionally, the left hand navigation is much more important to people than the large graphic on the top. Based on this information, we believe that the page layout should be changed to increase the menu size and decrease the image size, in order to improve site usability and conversion rates.
Runner up – Andrew Lahser, LasherPatents.com
| “Being able to almost-look-over-the-shoulder of my visitors is invaluable. I have tripled or quadrupled the time that new visitors spend at my site.” |  |
Our experts say: We can clearly see here what content is most carefully read, which tells us what content draws visitors’ attention and what to focus on in future copywriting.
Runner up – NoirVogue.com
| “It’s been an invaluable tool for me, and has given me a much clearer indication what my clients want and expect from me” |  |
Our experts say: From the hotspot in the top right corner, we can see that more people actually want to see information and contact details about the photographer than want to see the pictures! That’s why they’re moving their mouse to the top right corner instead of over the images, where they expect to find actionable information. This site desperately needs clearer Call to Action buttons to increase its conversion rates.
Runner up – David Ricupero, ParamountCareGroup.com
| “The results? Leads and happy customers increased. A complete success!” |
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Our experts say: It is obvious that people care about the information delivered in this page, as most of the attention is focused within the text. Here we can clearly see examples of visitors using their mouse as a pointer while they read through the content!
The Call to Action buttons on the right sidebar also get some healthy exposure, but no one pays attention to the left sidebar image. Shrinking this sidebar or adding some relevant content would greatly improve site usability.
Runner up – Robbin Steif, Lunametrics.com
| “The hot red spots you can see are the new page elements that we added, and which will feature much more prominently in our new design. We strongly encourage many of our customers to use your product” |  |
Our experts say: This heatmap is fairly evenly distributed, implying a healthy page layout. From the link analytics we can see that over 12% of visitors are interested in the “Google Analytics Authorized consultants” button (6.2%) and text link (6.2%), which may mean customers first want to be assured of credibility, and then want to know about the service.
Runner up – Tyson stokes, FamilySearch.org
| “The results far exceed what you could hope for from a customer experience analytics tool.” |  |
Our experts say: Although the clicks within the fields themselves imply that this form is easy to use, the lower click count seen in the “Year Range” box can be improved by using a dropdown or calendar box.
That’s it for 2009!
We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who took the time to send us their heatmaps, and want to say a massive thank you to everyone who took part. We’d love to hear what you think about this year’s competition winners, feel free to let us know in the comments below.
Happy holidays, see you in 2010,
The ClickTale Team
ClickTale’s Holiday Give-Away
Win up to $250 to spend at the Apple store!
We’ve had a great 2009! We’ve launched some incredible products and helped tens of thousands of businesses optimize their websites. So we wanted to give something back to you, our subscribers. And what better way to do that than by giving away loads of free stuff to make sure your year also goes out with a bang!
Today we are announcing our 2009 Holiday Contest and giving away a whole stack of vouchers to spend in the Apple or iTunes* store. First prize is a whopping $250 voucher which would get you any of these:
Second prize is a $100 voucher, third prize is a $50 voucher, and we’ll also be giving away five runner-up prizes of $10 vouchers to noteworthy entries.
To enter the 2009 Holiday Contest, all you have to do is take a screenshot of a ClickTale heatmap on your website. Any heatmap will do, a Mouse Move, Mouse Click, Attention or Scrolling. Send it to us, along with a paragraph or two about how you’ve used ClickTale to optimize your website, improve your customers’ experience, or just write nice things about us.
All entries should be sent to contest2009@clicktale.com by the 16th of December, that’s two weeks from today. We’ll pick the best ones by the 18th and post the winning images on our website.
There is no limit to how many entries you can send, and the contest is open to all ClickTale subscribers, including users on our free plan. This contest is even open to new subscribers, so if you’re not already using ClickTale, you can sign up today and win!
* based on winner’s preference and country availability.
Eye Tracking for Everyone
“The definitive method for conducting accurate eye-tracking on a massive scale at a fraction of the cost”
Today, ClickTale is launching its new Mouse Move Heatmap, which is set to revolutionize the fields of Customer Experience Analytics and website usability. 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. Instead of testing a handful of users for thousands of dollars, you can test thousands of users for a fraction of a dollar each!
The Mouse Move Heatmap on our Features page shows us exactly what content our visitors look at
Until now, Eye-tracking studies were the preferred choice in web usability testing. They allow website owners to know exactly how people use their sites, where they look, what grabs their attention and what they focus on. However the price of this technology is extremely prohibitive, costing tens of thousands of dollars for a single study. It has therefore only been accessible to the biggest web companies, and has been used by Google, Yahoo! and eBay.
Independent research shows that there is an 84% to 88% correlation between mouse and eye movements*, allowing us to create high-precision heatmaps based on just the users’ mouse movements. In addition, our heatmaps don’t require the subjects to wear a special headset or use special equipment. Indeed, most visitors aren’t even aware they’re being recorded, allowing for a completely transparent and anonymous usability testing process.
Within our FAQ page, we can see which questions people find the most interesting, and which answers they read.
We keep the data for every version of your page allowing for effortless A/B testing of multiple page elements. See which content, elements and layout increase conversion rates, where your customers look before they purchase a product, and how many people miss your call to action buttons. This new heatmap will help you dramatically improve your conversion rates by delivering accurate, relevant and actionable information.
This is the third heatmap launched by ClickTale, and adds to our existing suite of powerful visual web analytics. This includes our Mouse Click Heatmap, which shows you exactly where your visitors are clicking and our Attention and Scroll-Reach Heatmaps, which show you how visitors scroll, where they focus their attention and what content they skip over.
Mouse Movements within our signup form
Our Mouse Move Heatmaps are available to all our customers, even on our free plan, but are limited to the most popular pages on our free and Bronze plans. To see comprehensive heatmaps on all the pages in your site, these customers will need to upgrade to our Silver or Gold plans.
Our new Mouse Move Heatmap, as well as our other heatmaps, behavioral analytics and full video playback make ClickTale the perfect complement to your traditional web analytics suite. Sign up today and start learning how to optimize your website based on your customers’ actual behavior. Start increasing your conversion rates, minimizing your site abandonment, and maximizing your profits.
* “Of the regions that a mouse cursor visited, 84% of them were also visited by an eye gaze. Furthermore, among the regions that the eye gaze didn’t visit, 88% of them were not visited by the mouse cursor, either.” - M. C. Chen , J. R. Anderson , M. H. Sohn, “What can a mouse cursor tell us more?: correlation of eye/mouse movements on web browsing”, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2001, Seattle, WA.
How to Fix Your Funnels!
Within 24 hours of using ClickTale’s new Search I was able to find and fix some major flaws in my checkout process. This service alone is worth every penny of the subscription price!” – T. Jacobson, Founder, FreeSocialStuff.com
Today we are proud to officially launch our new Search and Alerts. These incredibly powerful tools allows you to define any business process, scenario or funnel and see exactly which visitors completed the process, which dropped out, and why! From e-commerce funnels and online checkouts to complicated website navigation and everything in between, any process you have can be tracked and optimized. The possibilities are literally endless!
Until now, traditional web analytics might show you where your potential customers drop out of your funnels, but now with ClickTale’s new Search and Alerts you can find out why! Instead of wading through hundreds of hours of videos, you can filter your visitors and only see the recordings of customers who match specific business scenarios. By optimizing your customer’s progress through your funnels you can guarantee better conversion rates, increased sales and see a much higher return on your investment.
These new tools are available for free, right now, to all our subscribers, and require no additional setup or installation. In this post we’ll show you how to use them, and give you some real life business scenarios that will help you improve your conversion rates.
If you can define it, you can find it
To make the most of this new tool, we recommend you use the following short, three-step method:
1. Decide what you want to see
This could be customers who sign up for a newsletter, start a free trial, arrange for a callback, attempt to buy a product or download a whitepaper.
2. Define the process
You can define a funnel or business process with any number of possible parameters. Where your customers came from, what pages they visited, what links they clicked on, and if they successfully converted. If you want to get more specific, you can even define your funnels by customers who hovered over a button or link but DIDN’T click on it, differentiate between quick customers and those who took a while to checkout, and even between your higher paying customers and your lower paying ones!
3. Search for customers
Finally, select the filters that define your process in our new Search section, run the search, save it for repeat use or set up personalized email alerts. If you’re searching for a more advanced processes or funnels based on visitor hovers or clicks, you’ll need to mark these occurrences as Events in your site.
That’s it! Now you can quickly and easily search for customers that dropped out at each individual step in the process, and watch a video of their actual browsing session to find out why they left the funnel. You can filter the data further by demographics, browser, language, location or even fold height. Find out if your customers are facing browser compatibility issues, language issues or just plain usability issues.
The Search in Action – Using it on ClickTale.com
Here is a real-life example that shows you how easy it is to use our Search and Alerts. We’re going to show you how we added value to our own website. Following our own methodology, first we decided we wanted to look for lost customers who started to convert but never completed the process. We defined the funnel as follows:
- Customers who came to our home page
- Went on to our pricing page
- Chose a plan and clicked the sign up button
- But did not complete the sign up form
- And did not contact us afterwards
Then we marked two links on our site as Events. First we marked the “sign up” button in the pricing page, and then the “submit” button at the end of the sign up form. Finally we ran a search with the following filters:
The whole process took less than 5 minutes from start to finish, and has already provided us with invaluable data. To learn about what we found and the changes we made to our site, you will have to wait for a future blog post…
But wait, there’s more!
To cap it all off, we’re also releasing our new Alerts into public beta. These are custom email notifications that let you know when a visitor’s actions meet one of your pre-defined search criteria. These can be particularly useful if you’ve created a search for visitors who encounter JavaScript errors, customers unable to access a checkout page or any other time-critical events. These new Search and Alerts are available to all our subscribers, even on our Free Plan. However, advanced filtering based on tagged Events are only available on our Paid Plans. Free customers will need to upgrade their account before they can tag Events.
We believe our new Search and Alerts, as well as our visual heatmaps, behavioral analytics and full video playback make ClickTale the perfect complement to your traditional web analytics suite. Sign up today and start learning how to optimize your website based on your customers’ actual behavior. Start increasing your conversion rates, minimizing your site abandonment, and maximizing your profits.
ClickTale on Yahoo! Store Pages
Record everything your customers do inside your Yahoo! Store pages with our clean and simple integration
We are happy to announce that we now fully support recording visitors inside Yahoo! Stores, both in the store front and checkout pages. ClickTale subscribers can now take advantage of our Industry leading Customer Experience Analytics on the world’s most popular E-commerce platform.
Now you can watch videos of your customers’ actual browsing sessions inside your Yahoo! Store. See your site through the eyes of your customers by watching their every mouse move, click, scroll and keystroke. It’s as if you were looking over their shoulder!
With our new integration you can make the most of all the powerful features of ClickTale, such as our heatmaps and behavioral reports, within your Yahoo! Store pages. These include our Mouse Click Heatmaps, which show you exactly where your visitors are clicking and our Attention and Scroll-Reach Heatmaps, which show you how visitors scroll, where they focus their attention and what content they skip over. It even works with our Form Analytics, which reveal how visitors use your online forms, and enables you to maximize your store’s conversion rates.
The ClickTale analytics suite works flawlessly alongside your existing Yahoo Web Analytics, or any other analytics service. It has no perceivable effect on page load times, and by providing both quantitative and qualitative data, is the perfect complement to your traditional web analytics software.
This powerful integration is exceptionally easy to use, and can be setup within minutes. To record your store pages, all you have to do is generate the ClickTale Tracking Code inside your ClickTale account, copy the top code into the “Head-tags” field in your Yahoo! Store, and the bottom code into your “Final-text” field. That’s it! We’ll begin tracking your visitors right away.
Recording the secure checkout pages is just as easy. However, as it requires HTTPS and SSL, it is only available on our paid plans. For security reasons, no Personal Identifiably Information (PII) or Cardholder Data (CDI) is captured within these pages, but we still catch every mouse move, click, scroll and hover. Paid ClickTale subscribers should follow these instructions to record their checkout pages, while free customers first need to upgrade their account.
Our powerful and flexible tools will enable you to get the most out of your Yahoo! Store, or any website, by increasing conversion rates, minimizing abandonment, and maximizing profits. So sign up today and start learning how to optimize your website based on your customers’ actual behavior.
