ClickTale - Web Analytics via recorded video sessions

Posted on August 6, 2007 at 12:19 pm

ClickTale is a new web analytics tool released to the public today that records video of users sessions once they visit your site. Simply put, once installed, ClickTale will record every action of a visitor as they browse your site, including where they move their mouse, where they click, and how far they scroll down. That’s cool, but watching hundreds of individual videos would be cumbersome and not completely accurate, so ClickTale automatically generates reports that aggregates the thousands of visitor sessions to easily find trends, increase web site usability, or correct navigational issues.

ClickTale is a hosted solution and therefore requires no installation or setup on your part. Just like Google Analytics, you need to simply add a piece of JavaScript code to your web page. This also means that the users browsing your web site will not be adversely effected by ClickTale nor will other JavaScript code, such as for Google Analytics.

ClickTale does not record any demographic information about the visitors since it has no idea who is coming to the web site. This information could prove to be useful, but as of now it’s completely anonymous. However, ClickTale has the ability to record secure pages, such as shopping carts, etc, but sensitive fields can be omitted if desired.

ClickTale also has a feature called scrolling Heat Maps that let you visually see how many times a user hovered over a link, but did not click it or how long it took a user to click after they first landed on the page. You can even get stats on which links were hovered over first, second, etc (the most attractive links). These heat maps help give a better understanding of how users interact within a web site.

Also, using the heat maps, you can see which pages are getting more attention based on average time spent viewing and how many visitors looked at the entire page including the bottom of the page. This kind of data is fairly unique from what I have seen; I don’t think Google Analytics has this type of data currently.

The service is free for 100 recordings per week, which is ok for a very small web site or blog. Otherwise, you can go all the way up to $99 a month, which gets you 1,000 recordings per day and the ability to record HTTPS sessions.

Definitely something to check out!

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