As regular readers will know, I love Google Analytics. Its a great piece of free software and can tell you a lot about how users interact with your website. However it can’t do everything, sometimes you need something a bit more advanced to tell you more details about users. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at various Analytics products which help spot problems with converting a visitor into a buyer, one of the products I came across was Clicktale.
I noticed that they have a free trial so I decided to install Clicktale on this blog to get an idea of what it can do. I was pretty amazed with what I learnt and what Clicktale can do, even with just the free version. With the free version you get access to click heatmaps which show you were people have clicked on a certain page, you also get access to scrolling heatmaps which shows you which section of a page people keep their attention on the most. A great application for this would be if you have an ecommerce website and wonder whether people actually scroll all the way down a long product page.
The best part of Clicktale for me though is the opportunity to watch actual videos of browsing sessions by real users. So you can see exactly what they did as they browse your website. This really is valuable information which is also very actionable. You can make an assessment on what people do on their site and change your design or calls to action to suit. Although there is a drawback – if you are a large website recording hundreds of sessions, you can’t aggregate them into one movie like you can with heatmaps etc. So this is a potential issue.
One thing that I learnt from the analysis run on my blog, is that the blog post titled “New SEO Strategies and Marketing Ideas” which is linked from the right hand side, attracted more clicks that any other blog post in that section of the page. So I know that this kind of content is of high interest to my visitors. But it also tells me I may need to work on my other blog post titles as they attracted very little attention! You can see how this data was shown to me in the image below -
Clicktale have a free trial version which gives you a good idea of what it can do, I’d recommend just giving it a try and seeing what feedback you can get from this. I’m sure you can get some good, actionable tips just from the free version. If you are running an Ecommerce website, I think software like Clicktale is essential.
Tags: clicktale software review, Google Analytics, SEO, usability software, web analytics, web analytics software
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