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.
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That seems like it’s just got to soak up a lot of processor potentially, though I guess it’s not something you want on every page anyway.
Sounds interesting enough to try out, for sure.
Is the service free? If so, they must be having an awful time monetizing it - its too much work for the money on the cards….
something to try tomorrow
TechCrunch, thanks for writing about us. We didn’t expect the story so early, the Free Account sign up will be available on Monday at 6 AM (EST).
ClickTale is already active on thousands of websites and we have made millions of recordings. We optimized the service to minimize the use of CPU and bandwidth resources, so website visitors do not notice any difference in their browsing experience.
Also, you would want to have the ClickTale script on every significant page, so you can watch a visitor’s entire “movie” of interactions with your website.
Tal Schwartz
Co-Founder and CEO
ClickTale
Good to hear about the free account being available soon.
http://www.crenk.com
sounds like an interesting thing to try. Thanks
this sort of very detailed data can be helpful on campaign landing pages, to analyze closely what visitors do on a certain page.
but generally speaking for daily web statistics we don’t need statistics of pixel area of hover links:)
I didn´t know this startup, but it sounds like it´s gonna be a huge revolution. Thanks for the information.
Thanks for the discovery. looks promising enough to be tested.
I’ve done a review on Crazy Egg and found it to be very helpful. Because a few pages are free (there’s a premium version too) it’s great for the blogger.
http://www.web-strategist.com/.....d-content/
Looks like a great service. Will definitely try it tomorrow.
I’ve been using it for a few months now, it’s very useful…
Cool. I think analytics are going to become increasingly important in the coming year, particularly for video. It’s a smart place to play.
It’s an interesting idea, but is there really any interesting data in where the user places their mouse to “hover”? I don’t think I exhibit that behavior in my daily surfing; my eye movements would be interesting - but my mouse location is pretty irrelevant, I would think.
But something that WOULD be interesting, that current off-the-shelf analytics packages do not track, is to what degree my users are scrolling the web page, and how much time are they spending looking at different (visible) parts of the page.
I would think you could come up with a pseudo-heatmap based on scrolling of the page, rather than eye-tracking.
oops. I should read the article more carefully. ClickTale’s Scrolling Heatmap is just what I was suggesting. Very cool!
I’ve always wanted to check out ClickTale. Heatmaps sound very interesting in analyzing my data!
Ouriel, a sample size of 1000 is statistically sufficient for any large website to draw an analysis. Pick up any stats textbook or speak to any person who has studied statistics before you make such general statements.
the question is whether you get a representative sample of your population of not: 1000 is the number of recorded sessions not unique users. This could compromise the interpretation of the end result.
Tal, you did not precise any timing of publicitation in your emails. be clearer if you need a specific embargo.
Agreed Ouriel. 1000 randomly recorded sessions will give you a representative sample with a very high confidence level. Cases where this may not be true would constitute a miniscule portion of Internet properties. Would appreciate if you could give me an example where you would not get a representative sample for 1000 randomly recorded sessions (apart from sites which have users from diverse countries on the same domain name).
Nice tool, I haven’t tried clicktale yet but I use CrazyEgg and it has been really useful. I guess I have to try ClickTale tomorrow.
Adani,
Example: your site appears on TechCrunch, and you get a thousand hits from highly technical, zero patience geeks. If the recorded sessions are sequential rather than randomly drawn - voila
ClickTale itself is using Google Analytics, see the page source of their homepage!
Doesn’t Analtyics provide a similar service?
Guk,
Traditional web analytics provide aggregated visitor data across web pages, we provide information about individual visitor behavior inside the web page.
We capture every mouse movement, every scroll, every keystroke and every click. We turn this data into movies of browsing sessions, as well as meaningful reports of behavior inside their webpage, such as the ClickTale Heatmap with Link Analytics and Scrolling Map featured in this blog.
Now, website owners can gain a deeper understanding of visitor behavior, which leads to improved website usability, enhanced navigation, and increased overall website effectiveness.
Tal Schwartz
Co-Founder and CEO
ClickTale
There’s such a thing as TMI
And only a noob that just learned to read goes hovering around the page with the mouse pointer, LOL!
Nothing here, move along.
it sounds very interesting. Thanks!
“Nothing here, move along.” PJ - I think you might be missing a potential use of this product and are judging it prematurely.
It is currently a best practice to design web pages that online ads point to as single, long landing pages. One challenge for marketer is having visibility into what prospects are doing on those pages, as opposed to traditional “content” sessions where a visitor might interact with many pages on a site and traditional analytics reporting might suffice.
For instance, for visitors who drop off and do not convert to a sale, how far do they scroll? Do they get further than above-the-fold (the part of a web page you see without scrolling)? If you have multiple buy areas/links on the page - which ones tend to convert? Could you get rid of the rest and save valuable page real estate?
There are many questions this type of tool could answer that ultimately could lead to insights that create breakthoughs on future landing page optimization tests….and that’s worth a lot of money.
Its a service worth trying esp. if you can then improve website usability. I will still have to check whether it doesn’t slow down things on my sites because for me that would be big concern.
Pretty sweet service. Though the amount of time it will take to analyze and optimize says this is for full-timers.
Ive been messing around with this a little today, and its almost creepy to see exactly what a user is doing. Definitely very interesting though, and I don’t see analysis like this going away
Dan, this is navel-gazing analytics obsession. It’s obvious what this tool will tell you: the stuff at the top has more hovers. If there’s any pattern at all, looking at your clicks tells you much more than you needed to know about scrolling, etc.
This sounds cool because it’s fun to “watch” people use your site, I know. Back in the DOS days you could see everything, even jump into a split-screen chat. But that geewiz excitement wears off with experience.
“It is currently a best practice to design web pages that online ads point to as single, long landing pages.”
You read that in an ebook on how to sell ebooks?
“One challenge for marketer is having visibility into what prospects are doing on those pages, as opposed to traditional “content” sessions where a visitor might interact with many pages on a site and traditional analytics reporting might suffice.”
It’s not a challenge. Either you made money or you didn’t. The best changes you can make require only common sense. Look at the page as a real person.
“If you have multiple buy areas/links on the page - which ones tend to convert? Could you get rid of the rest and save valuable page real estate?”
The most basic stats program (awstats) tells you this much. As far as removing non-essential stuff, that’s called editing. Common sense.
PJ, there is a whole world of web analytics with thousands of companies paying millions to optimize and improve their websites. Awstats is nice, but nothing like what you can get with more advanced packages.
The trend towards AJAX means that these players will need to change their old techniques (pageviews) and start implementing innovative technologies, like what ClickTale is doing.
This is a revolution, too bad some people will be left behind.
If you think “players” still count pageviews, maybe somebody left you behind in 1998 before cookie tracking gained popularity. LOL
Anyway, have fun in your mouse-hover fantasy world.
There is a nice clip of a visitor scrolling down a website that has clicktale on it.
http://www.bizorigin.com/2007/.....r-website/
Omniture has a feature called “ClickMap” which is essentially the same. Of course, it ain’t free
Surprised to learn that tapefailure is run by an 18 year old kid, a one-man band run out of his room at home, under $10k in annual revenue. Is it really accurate to call it a competitor of Clicktale? Sonny boy goes to college in a few weeks and I suppose it will go away
found something similar to clicktale at vulabs.com
@Y.S. & Dann
I checked out that vulabs.com site and they totally track ajax like it’s no big deal. When you replay a user you can see every change to the dom done by ajax. It’s actually kind of cool. Will come in handy on some of my sites where click tale couldn’t show me what was happening because of ajax.