In February the Israel Web Tour rolls into Silicon Valley. Ninety Israeli startups applied to join the tour, and fifteen of them were selected to attend. The tour consists of a week-long conference and cultural exchange between Silicon Valley and Israeli entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

The general public is invited to parts of the show. more information is available on this website, including speakers.

Participating startups include 5min, Plymedia, AllofMe, Nuconomy, ClickTale, blogTV, Sportingo, PicScout, Qoof, 8hands, Velingo, Innovid, Semingo, PageOnce and Journeys.

I moderated a panel at the event last year. Highlights from that panel and the event in general are in the video below.

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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.

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Israel based ClickTale provides a new service that bridges an important gap in the land of online statistic services. The service is in private beta for now but should be releasing soon. Until then you can register for an invitation at ClickTale.com We had the chance to get an exclusive private preview.

If you are a site owner, understanding your users is a primary concern to optimize the usability of your online service. Most statistic services, whether user centric (eg NielsenNetRatings) network centric (eg HitWise) or site centric (eg Omniture for websites and SiteMeter, Performancing, Mint or BlogBeat for Blogs), will generate very thorough reports on page views, inbound and outbound links, time spent, visitors profile and origins as well as most clicked links and other parameters. In some cases (Eyetracking, Google Analytics and MeasureMap) they will even generate “heat zones” of most watched or clicked areas. But no one, as far as I know, is able to explain precisely the dynamic behavior of an internet user on a given web page (think mouse gestures, dynamic browsing,…).

ClickTale, who claims that “every user has a story”, will solve that issue by offering to any website or blog owner the possibility of viewing in a movie individual browsing sessions (watch an example here).

Unlike traditional web analytics that produce only pure statistics, ClickTale gives webmasters the ability to watch movies of users’ individual browsing sessions. Every mouse movement, every click and every keystroke are recorded for convenient playback. With ClickTale, webmasters can improve website usability, enhance navigation, and increase website effectiveness.

Just as a store manager visually monitors his customers’ shopping habits, ClickTale gives website owners the ability to watch their visitors browsing habits.

But that would not be so much helpful if that raw data could not be analyzed and digested. Especially for highly visited websites. I would certainly be excited by the first 50 videos but would quickly get bored after a while, and worse, could not even learn from those tens of thousands of video sessions. So, the company has also designed the statistics tools to draw conclusions from all that rich data.

In addition to movies, ClickTale provides a unique set of statistics that address important usability questions. For example, the “Percent of Page Viewed” statistic can answer “how much of the webpage did users see and how often did they scroll to the webpage’s bottom?” and the “Active Browsing Time” statistic can answer “how long did users actively browse a webpage, as opposed to just having an open inactive browser?” And there is much, much more…

In a close future ClickTale will even include new analytical capabilities that will aggregate millions of customer’s recordings providing them with a unique global perspective and help you better understand behaviors of your users to improve your site.

The interesting point is that this service will be made available to everyone and not only to big corporations greedy in user stats. ClickTale is a hosted service, so no installation is needed on the server-side or client-side and setup takes only a few minutes. Webmasters add a small piece of javascript code to their webpages. The javascript collects browsing data and transmits it to the ClickTale servers for processing. ClickTale creates movies of browsing sessions almost instantaneously and webmasters can log-in securely at anytime to view these movies. This point is important: Indeed the technology is site centric, meaning not based on a panel of users but on the site total active user base.

Privacy is a high concern addressed by ClickTale. 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.

I think ClickTale can be a good complement to existing statistics services as they will help understanding dynamic behaviors, in particular if they are able to aggregate raw data in a more digestible way. No precision yet on the business model, but we can assume that part of this service will go premium. More information on their blog.

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