Winston Ong
Latest posts by Winston Ong (see all)
- Common form engagement tracking techniques with custom variables in Google Tag Manager - December 5, 2018
- What exactly is a doorway page anyway? - November 30, 2018
- Are you completely misreading time on site in Google Analytics? - July 11, 2016
Clicktale is a web analytics program with a difference. Although there’s not much value added from the standard metrics you’d find on free software like Google Analytics eg traffic sources, time on site, funnel visualisation, bounce rate, etc, Clicktale offers two big features you won’t find done better on any other UX analytics platform: visual behavioural data and visitor session recordings.
Visual Data and Overlayed Heat Maps
Clicktale provides a few useful visual data overlayed on each page of your site:
Mouse movement
Clicktale aggregates each individual visitor’s mouse movements on every page of your site, providing a heatmap of activity. Clicktale claims
there is and 84%- 88% correlation between mouse and eye movements.
which doesn’t seem unreasonable. So this data can be used to see which areas of each page attract the most visitor attention. There’s even a filter you can apply (which is actually set on by default) to show only visualisation from the 1st minute of visit sessions. This would give a good indication of what visitors looks at immediately when they visit your site.
Mouse Click
Useful for seeing a perspective on usability you might miss as a site owner who has looked at the same pages many times over. In the screenshot above you’ll notice a couple of clicks (albeit not many) on the text “Get a FREE COPY of Australia’s” however this text wasn’t actually clickable.
There’s a similar feature in Google Analytics called ‘in-page analytics’. However analytics tracks clicks via hits to specific pages from the overlayed page. Therefore, it can’t distinguish between a two links that go to the same page eg a top navigation button and a footer link, and will report the click percentage as identical which would be obviously incorrect.
3) Scroll Reach
The Scroll-Reach heatmap enables you to make sure relevant content, links and call to action buttons are seen by the vast majority of your visitors, and to find the exposure level of each element on your site.
Best practice is to put the most important content at the top of the page, but make sure that visitors are aware that there is valuable content below the fold. Visitors who are engaged and interested in this content will scroll down.
Recorded Video Sessions
Visitor recordings enable you to see absolutely everything a visitor does on your website, every mouse move, hover, click and scroll. It’s pretty interesting – just set a ratio of recordings to make based on daily site traffic and Clicktail can store store thousands of visitor recordings. Navigating and filtering through to the most insightful videos can be a challenge, though. Not for a lack of options – there are a huge range of filters available:
Evaluation
Clicktale is definitely worth trying out its free plan. I do however question its value as a paid agency software however. You get more domains and more recordings per domain for you to manage multiple clients. However there is very little support for simple tasks like exporting reports, creating custom reports, downloading images and even downloading videos in a standard file format.
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