ClickTale explores further heatmap analytics
Ouriel Ohayon
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About a year ago we were announcing the birth of Clicktale, an Israeli based startup that provides a new generation of web analytics service based on the analysis of recorded video sessions of your users once they land on your website. Clicktale has been patiently working on their service and invited to a few users in private beta. In the meantime a few competitors have released comparable services among which RobotReplay and TapeFailure.
Tomorrow, Monday 6th of August, Clicktale will open its new service to the public with a new series of useful features. One of our expectations when we first reviewed Clicktale was the possibility of producing reports of aggregated data out of those hundreds or thousands of video user sessions. Individual sessions won’t help website owners and marketers because they are not representative and cannot trigger decisions to optimize your website. And Clicktale might have found the right way to process all that information in a useful and action-oriented way.
They are releasing a new generation of Heatmap that displays smart data of dynamic users behaviours and their interactions with clickable items. They call it ‘link analytics’ and web site owners will be able to access a series of new metrics to better understand how using are interacting:
- “Hovers over Links” indicates the number of mouse hovers over a link, which tells how attractive a link is to a 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 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 and the moment a link is clicked. This helps understanding which links are most attractive.
Here are a a few examples on how those metrics are presented. To my knowledge this is a unique set of data (feel free to indicate alternatives if any). In addition Clicktale provides several scrolling heatmaps released a few months ago that help understand better user attention and browsing behaviour.
One important aspect that is missing for me is the possibility to combine all that rich data with the demograhics of the users which would help understand better the differences of behaviours depending on the age group, or gender. This will probably be hard to implement since the tracking is web site centric (you need to install a small script on your site) and users are unknown to Clicktale. Maybe an enterprise solution could help getting there.
Clicktale will be free of charge for a package of a 100 pages recorded per week which should be enough for small websites or blogs. But if you are aiming at more significant data you will need to subscribe to one of the premium packages which go up to 99 dollars per month for 1000 recording per day. I wonder if even the largest offer provides enough critical size for big websites (this is why they offer extra recording sessions and customized service for large accounts i guess). But this innovative service will certainly interest the long tail of the market and maybe more.
CrazyEgg and ClickDensity previously covered on TechCrunch offer complementary heatmap services.
August 6th, 2007 at 6:46 am
August 19th, 2007 at 10:34 pm