What is ClickTale
The ClickTale web analytics tool gives you insights into your site visitors’ online behavior. You can use ClickTale to optimize your website’s performance, make it more accessible and user friends, and increase your conversion rates. ClickTale tracks mouse movements, mouse clicks and page scrolls, creating videos of customers’ browsing sessions, as well as heatmaps and behavioral reports. ClickTale doesn’t come to replace traditional web analytics tools (like Google Analytics), but to augment them.
So what does ClickTale give you?
ClickTale provides you with quite a few tools that help you understand how your visitors are interacting with your content – what they are clicking on, what they are reading, and even how they fill out forms. With browser session recordings it’s very easy to review customer experience afterwards, and of course, adjust accordingly.
Other than seeing recording and web analytics reports, you can also see real time activity in your website which helps you make quick decisions – if you have high traffic, then your A/B tests can take hours, not days or weeks.
So what other features does the ClickTale analytics tool have?
Visitor Recordings:
The Visitor Recordings feature enables you to watch everything visitors do on your home page, and any other page you choose to track. CrazyEgg captures mouse movements and clicks (using Javascript code that you need to embed into your website’s html code).
Watching exactly what your visitors do on your homepage is an interesting experience. You keep wanting to shout ‘no, click THERE’, even though they’ve left the page a long time ago. On the other hand, as ClickTale doesn’t actually record your website faithfully, you can actually get the wrong sort of impression from watching these videos – so be careful, and as with any other web analytics tool, double check as you go.
ClickTale does have an excellent filtering system that lets you find videos of customers that dropped out at pre-defined points, such as check outs, filling out forms, submitting emails and so on. These videos help you see the general experience of your customers when they reach these places, and what you can do to improve the funnel.
Mouse Heatmaps
As opposed to the videos, which record each individual user (and when you have 1,000 visits a day, you could spend hours just watching users), heatmaps aggregate information. The mouse heatmaps show you mouse movements and clicks of thousands of visitors on the webpage, which gives you a visual understanding of what people are focusing on when they visit your page.
Data is saved for each individual page, which makes this a great analytics tool to test A/B variants – you can see which page gets people to focus on your call to action more, and what they pay attention to before clicking that check out button (or choosing to close the window).
Click Heatmaps
Click heatmaps aggregate a different set information to the mouse heatmaps. Instead of mouse movements, you can see where people clicked on your web page, regardless of where they clicked – link, text, images, dead space – everything is added to the report. This is an excellent way to see how adverts perform, if there are any objects that are taking focus away from your primary call to action, and more.
As mouse heatmaps are notoriously problematic (you aren’t exactly following this text with your mouse just now, right?), click heatmaps will probably give you a much better picture of how to improve your landing pages to increase conversions and lose less clicks.
Another cool addition to the Click Heatmaps is the wealth of data that the web analytics tool gives you for every link clicked. You can see the number of clicks and the percent of the total clicks on every link, how long someone has hovered over a click, how long it takes for them to click, and more.
Attention Heatmaps
The last significant feature is the attention heatmap. This gives you a visual understanding of areas – you can see which area and content your visitors care about and read, and what they skip over completely.
Of course, once you know what people want to read, and where they expect to find it, then your job of writing attention-grabbing content and placing that ‘Download’ button just got that much easier, and you know just where you need to place your ads to give them the most profitable attention.
Pros:
- Has good link data
- Real time information about your users
- Videos of user interactions
Cons:
- Isn’t accurate
- A very limited free plan, and no pricing plans
Web Analytics Tools 