Actually this is not the first software in this space. I think Tealeaf (http://www.tealeaf.com/) was the first enterprise software that allowed the ‘replay’ of a visitor’s session. This software is great for finding production issues, giving insight to web UI designers, and providing more information for customer service reps. I’ve used this software quite a lot and frankly cannot imagine how a large site can live without it (I’m just an evangelist and have no relation to the company)

From what the website says, it appears the Clicktale software records visitor’s actions and is not a literal screenshot of the page (like Tealeaf provides). This will be perfect for blogs, but I’m concerned that it may fall short when dealing with more dynamic pages. I am also interested to see how it deals with AJAX type elements on a page.

That said… the fact that this is a hosted service puts it in a completely different (and in my mind more lucrative) category. I am very excited to see it in action!!!

Correction:
Tealeaf doesn’t take a screenshot, it literally captures the entire page and archives it. However, Tealeaf literally watches the packets and resides between the user and the server… which is why I am somewhat skeptical of ClickTale performing the same action. But really, capturing the whole page may not be necessary, especially for what this solution is trying to provide.

This appears to be a lame attempt to catch up with CrazyEgg. CrazyEgg is wayy in the lead.

Paul> it looks like CrazyEgg only offers static heatmap/overlay and not dynamic sessions.

i would love to have this for my consumer electronics site. i’m still on crazyegg waiting list after 3 months…

Ouriel.. but even so, if someone has thousands of visitors per day there is no way that person is going to watch every session. It’s just ridiculous.

they plan to aggregate data as mentionned in my post.

Yeah I read that but I’m still skeptical. I guess it really has yet to be tested on a full-scale site… err, what i mean to say is, how will it scale. Trends may occur on a limited scale but once you get the big picture, people’s mousing habits are erratic at best. Well, I’ll just wait and see how this matures. Good read though Ouriel.

@ Paul….at least from the basic description there is no relation between CrazyEgg functions and those of ClickTale.

In a nutshell, they are both hosted stats and trend trackers for websites and lend themselves to similar uses.

pireland,

Thanks for your interesting comment. We are different from Tealeaf in that we are a hosted service and that we look into all those atomic actions that normally are not transmitted from the client to the server; such as keyboard events, mouse events, client side timings, and in-page navigation events.

Paul,

From what we know about CrazyEgg, and we don’t know much because they haven’t released that much information, they do heatmaps of mouse clicks.
We don’t do heatmaps at this stage, and for us, mouse clicks are just one part of a bigger picture (or story if you wish ). Instead, we give website owners the ability to get a detailed look at what happens in an individual page view (this is especially good for small-medium size websites or for debugging) as well as various aggregated metrics on the atomic data that we collect (this is more targeted to big sites).

This is, in a word, scary. Am I the only person concerned about something called PRIVACY?! The article and the ClickTale website says: “Only authorized website personnel can watch their website’s recordings. No activity is recorded outside of the webpage: no personal files, no internet history, no interactions with locally installed software, and users are not tracked between websites. Inside the webpage, passwords are never recorded.” Ok, that’s nice. But how about INFORMING WEBSITE VISITORS THAT THEIR EVERY MOVE IS BEING TRACKED?! No mention of that sort of basic, ethical disclosure can be found anywhere on the ClickTale site. Where can I find a list of sites that utilize ClickTale so I can be sure to AVOID them? It is disturbing how willing people are to give up their privacy rights (perhaps it is ignorance more than willingness) and how eager today’s companies are to surreptitiously seize our personal information.

Kal> did you know that most websites already track users statistics and you might not be aware of it (ebay/amazon/….)? Web sites are tracked, that s how they are made better. ClickTale is only adding a new level of data. The important thing is how the data is used and respected.

Ouriel, thanks for a great story on ClickTale. Just a few hours have passed since the post was published and already hundreds of people have expressed their interest by applying to the beta program or just subscribing for updates.

Nick,
Those of you who subscribe for updates will get a second form where they can apply for a beta program. It might take us some time to process all of the requests, but make sure that you are there if you want to try it on your CE site.

Sounds like a Great service.
You may find a coverage of all Israeli Web2.0 ventures and trends at http://www.thecoils.com (in hebrew)

this is super, especialy websites with little number of visitors but making good money from it. i wonder will it show who clicked on my adsense ad?:D

*plonk* - the sound of “*clicktale.com*” hitting by adblock filter.

You may /think/ that ebay/amazon/etc are “also tracking my browsing” but I have some bad news for you and them about cookie blocking/management, javascript blocking/management. Don’t even mention Flash…

*plonk* - the sound of “*clicktale.com*” hitting my adblock filter.

You may /think/ that ebay/amazon/etc are “also tracking my browsing” but I have some bad news for you and them about cookie blocking/management, javascript blocking/management. Don’t even mention Flash…

@Mike: Just because you block JS and cookies you still have an IP address and that is still tracked through the site. They know what links you clicked on and when, how long you spent on each page. You’re browsing is being tracked.

They just let you view it like ClickTale

@Mike: Just because you block JS and cookies you still have an IP address and that is still tracked through the site. They know what links you clicked on and when, how long you spent on each page. You’re browsing is being tracked.

They just *don’t* let you view it like ClickTale

http://www.speed-trap.com/UI.asp - This company offers a similar solution, though its more of an enterprise-level product.

@Mike (and Kal)
LOL. You might be surprised but most of the users are not concerned by this like you do. This is a personal preference and we respect that. There is an option to install a cookie that will disable the service for you (more on this in our soon to be released privacy policy), or you can use whatever tools that you are familiar with if you don’t like cookies.
The long answer is that ClickTale has a javascript API which allows website owners to start, stop, terminate, or tag a recording as well us disable recording for a certain user. So every webmaster will decide what his policy with regards to ClickTale is and could for example ask the user for permission prior to starting recording. Basically we let our clients decide how they will be utilizing our technology.

I don’t see the value in this, especially since it hasn’t differentiated itself. And personally, I don’t think it ever will. I use Tealeaf for production support and it is an amazing piece of software.

Typically, when I worked at an SEO company, the “trackers” were used to figure out where people were dropping off on a clients site. Usually it was at places like signup forms. There is value in it, and it’s typically beneficial for the user.

There’s my 2cents. I however will refuse to use one because I think there should be some kind of user “privacy” in relation to where they are on a site.

Well as for CrazyEgg what they ARE GOING to offer is exactly what Omniture OFFERS for couple of years already as a part of their services (it comes as free add-on to their SiteCatalyst product).

As for ClickTale I would like to see how they will aggregate the data. As you mentioned here it will be a nightmare to analyze 45 000 movies every day and try to group them somehow :).

There is a huge barrier to entry for people when it comes to the price of analytics packages like Omniture. Also they have a very robust package that is meant to do a lot of things and it requires some type of Internet marketer or analytics expert. Things like Crazy Egg and ClickTale are meant to provide tools for people who cannot afford the price and time investment in a web analytics package like Omniture.

@Mike: Congratulations, you’ve shut yourself off from most interesting Internet experiences, including purchasing, by blocking cookies. You might as well throw out your TV as well. Advertisers won’t mourn the loss of someone who won’t participate in a meaningful way with the medium.

Kal: Privacy?!? You really believe that exists any more? With $1000 and some basic information about you, I can buy almost any piece of information about your purchasing habits, what you purchased, etc. Privacy is dead. It was an invention of modern society anyway and it has failed. Get over it.

A similar service is available for free as a research platform at MIT Media Lab.
It works on most websites without any changes to the site. It has been used to track flickr, commercial websites and personal webpages.
It offers features like visualizing data by date, IP, and user session.

http://ctxt.media.mit.edu/php5usertrack_google/

Current work includes detecting user activity and labeling online articles and weblogs based on mouse behaviors.

Digg Story Here:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Webm.....ed_Service

@ Kal - you may want to avoid the grocery store, gas stations, department stores, restaurants, etc. They have video cameras watching your every move. They may even observe your behavior around aisle displays in an effort to better serve you. Be cautious. You may want to wear a mask.

Foobar, unless you’re a supreme newbie, you allow/deny cookies based on what service they provide. Block the doubleclick ones, allow them for your bank web site, etc. Plaster, the difference is this is monitoring you in YOUR OWN HOME. Without your knowledge or consent. That’d be like an architect infra-red camming your home and looking at movements to learn how to improve building design. Nice try though.

My senior capstone project was related to this research line. I developed a firefox extension that recorded this activity data, had participants install it and complete various tasks while being recorded.

Then I worked in Flash actionscript to render visualizations of the data. I am still working in this field and am very interested in the idea of aggregate visualization of this data.

If anyone else is interested in sharing ideas please contact me.

Arik/Tal,

Is there a way to watch the “average user”s behavior as a result of the aggregation & any statistical analysis that follow?

It might be neat for large websites as it can help augment the current testbed/user testing approach.

Tatat,
We are developing statistical tools that will enable aggregation of millions of movies. Resulting in an ability to understand the “average” and “non-average” user behavior.

Arik/Tal,

As I mentioned in my previous comment, my senior capstone project is very related to the design of this aggregate information over time. I am very interested in it, and have studied for it. Please view my project and portfolio and contact me if you would like to talk about this kind of work:

http://www.gmdw.com/capstone
http://www.gmdw.com

ClickTale looks good but looks like nothing new… moreover,
has anyone actually seen this work or is it another “CrazyEgg”
onepager ? I read a lot of “will, would, and future” above…

“Prior art” list:

http://www.opencube.com/mousetrends.asp (active, good and free)
http://www.mapsurface.com/ (active, interesting, good)
http://www.clickdensity.com/ (active, good, not free)
http://www.adgreed.com (active? not sure)
http://ctxt.media.mit.edu/php5usertrack_google/ (mentioned above)
http://www.crazyegg.com (hype?)

…and our own stuff which is not fit for public consumption.

Wanna build your own? Here’s some hints:

http://javascript.internet.com.....nates.html
http://www.anaesthetist.com/mn...../part4.htm
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/t...../eventinfo
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge.....94/fid/145
(last one is interesting… feb 12, 2000 ;-))

This is going to be so-o helpful for many SEOs and Web Designers - can’t wait until they start accepting beta testers

Webmasters have been begging for this type of technology - in an easy to install fashion

this will be a big help to blogs like http://www.telecommer.com where we have much information going on, and always are second-guessing ourselves what should be moved up or down or highlighted or dropped altogether or explained better.

Interesting, but this is clearly going to be for-fee service. Yet, there is no mention of pricing anywhere. The little demo video looks promising, but this company is essentially getting free Quality Assurance help from anyone who signs up. I’m also a bit skeptical about scaling a centralized service that promises to create real-time video for all ste visitors of all of their customers.

I take part in the alpha and can tell that on the sites I’ve used it for it did work, and was actually quite revealing. I could actually see which headlines in my site grab more attention, how people jump frantically from headline to headline - skimming the site for interesting stuff, checking out different parts of the page. Very interesting. This thing works for real.

Interesting!

I would participate with pleasure in beta but I do have a concern. Our experience shows that inserting third party java scripts to high traffic websites can dramatically reduce the speed of download for users and create connectivity problems.
I won’t insert anything until I make sure they have good infrustracture with load balancing.

@Templatemonster
That is a very good point and a true concern. One such event that I know of was when an outage of Google Analytics service caused many sites to be unavailable. This is why we are using a third party content distribution network provider, PantherExpress, to deliver our files.
We are designing the service in such a way that even if all of our servers are down, there will be no effect on the sites of our subscribers.

Templatemonster:
Our service is setup in the same manner, such that even if our servers fail, there will be no effect on visitors to the websites that are using our Crazy Egg.

Welcome to the fray… as I think the other respondants have identified, catching the click is one thing - turning that into useful insight, doing it with out hitting adblockers, cookie traps, privacy policies or personal privacy issues on sites with millions of visitors a day, doing it on all the browsers, with all the content management systems and AJAX et.etc.etc is a whole other program…

Malcolm, Well said.

I came across the Digg article first, so I’m cross-posting my comment from there. Pardon the dupe, but I figured it’s relevant and worth mentioning here also from a hobbyist-type perspective.

- - - [ as from http://digg.com/tech_news/Webm.....e#c2333022 ] - - -

It’s deja vu all over again!

I did this as an experiment for my site a few years back - I captured all mouse movement, clicks (what element was clicked, what “type” of click, etc.,) scrolling and so on. I’d only record a “frame” as being at least 16px of movement, so not too many “frames” were generated (and thus a ton of data to submit on unload.)

I was inspired by some of the Flash work of Yugo Nakumura, http://yugop.com - he had some “studies” called “fingertracks” which recorded and played the mouse movements of the last 5 or 6 visitors to his site, showing a grid of radio buttons that said “nothing” when hovered on.

Anyway, here’s the code (roughly 7 KB) I used on my site for my variant of this in 2003:
http://www.schillmania.com/int.....wsercap.js

I called it “BrowserCap” - and no, I never did anything with the info aside from see some random mouse movements, and no, it was not used on later versions of my site. I tried to set up some meetings with the Interaction/Architecture department of my employer at the time, but they were too busy to take a look at it.

It was an interesting experiment, but I don’t know if this has too much value “out there.” (Would vast amounts of this data really be meaningful over just tracking exit links, etc.?)

I put something like this together in a couple days.
http://dreamvendors.com/
primarily I didn’t like that all links on a page were rewritten to point to their servers..
I like to run things on my server

anyway, there is a free version and I may opensource the backend portions as well if there is any interest.. though, as a webservice it is a quick way to check out realtime stats and see.

Cool idea!

Earlier in the year I released an open source JavaScript library that can perform the recording and playback of all user interaction with a website. Its used to automatically generate and playback test-cases for a website.

http://blog.metawrap.com/blog/.....order.aspx

Its extensible via plug-ins so in theory someone could take this and create a similar service or create their own custom reporting system.

Sander mentioned clickdensity above - I just wanted to let you know that there is now a 30 free trial version available. Depending on your site, you may well find that this gives you all the data you need.

We are also currently working on a new package that will be suitable for smaller company or personal websites and will be priced accordingly. We have not yet finalized the details but are aiming to get the monthly cost to be less than a pint of beer costs here in the UK.

Full details will be on the website (http://www.clickdensity.com/) soon.

If you want to see an example of the reports that are generated, there is now a demo available too:

http://www.clickdensity.com/demo

Whilst clickdensity is already available, it is still very much in development. We have a huge list of features that we plan to add, but would really like to hear what you want. Please get in touch here…

http://www.clickdensity.com/ContactUs.aspx

As someone who spends their time writing usability reports for clients (it’s not as dull as it sounds!) I’m really excited at the potential these tools offer. I’ve been through the ones mentioned earlier in this post and they all seem to offer certain advantages. The ones that look most useful for my requirements are crazyegg and clickdensity. From the clickdensity site, it appears that the heatmaps are realtime which makes it particularly useful for the measure of incremental interface alterations. Be really interesting to see how these tools develop.