Recently we’ve been expanding our service range to include a lot more in the way of conversion rate optimisation and usability testing, as part of this we spent a lot of time investigating various tools that allow us to conduct usability tests without the expense of panel testing.
One of the tools we’ve started to use is ClickTale which (rather amazingly) produces a video of how your visitors browse through the website including mouse movement, mouse clicks, scrolling, data entry in forms and pretty much everything they do in a particular session.
It’s amazing how much a website can be improved just by watching people browse through the different pages and analysing how they interact with forms. For those of you concerned about privacy implications it’s worth noting that you can only read text entered in web forms if the visitor actually submits the form, otherwise it’s shown as a series of dots like a password field.
Another great feature of ClickTale is the form analytics which shows the fields that are causing problems in your forms. For example we found forms with particular fields that were always causing users to abandon the form and disappear – removing those fields gave a big increase in the number of users actually completing and submitting the form.
If you’ve had more experience with ClickTale let me know in the comments. The basic account is free so it’s easy to give it a try.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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I’ve used ClickTale with great success to improve the usability of landing pages. With actual sites we normally use usertesting.com but this can be overkill for a one page lander. Seeing how people use the page in such an unobtrusive manner was a real eye opener.
More comments from aroundtheweb1980Find me on Twitter
I’ve used ClickTale and found it to be really useful as well. There is a way of getting to know which form fields have been filled out with google analytics but it’s a bit more cumbersome than with ClickTale’s method.
More comments from Web Strategy 360Find me on Twitter
Never heard of this service before, very impressed by this tool and will have to sample it personally. Just when you thought Google Analytics could tell you everything you need to know, this comes along and blows it out the park.
I feel they will struggle to gain clients though at a package of near $6k a year, I wonder how many of their customers just utilize the free service.
More comments from Creare-Website-DesignFind me on Twitter
They may not be struggling as much as you think Pete. Like a lot of web startups, they’ve adopted a freemium model. Essentially, you give away most of your services for free and then charge something like 1% of your customer base for your premium products. So far it seems to be going well for them.
More comments from Web Strategy 360The free option looks really limited here, so it looks like $708/yr is the cheapest option. Still this could be well worth the money and I’m going to give it a try.
More comments from SEO-DoctorFind me on Twitter
Sounds like an amazing piece of kit, especially in relation to the forms. But it does come with quite a hefty price-tag just for the basic model, one-up from free. I wonder how many of their clients try it for free, and then buy a monthly package and how many simply utilize the free version and call it a day there?
More comments from LuciFind me on Twitter
Wow – this looks really cool. I had never heard of ClickTale but will make sure I have a play as I am sure it would be invaluable to clients to understand how people are using their sites.
More comments from Paul StallardAmazing service. I found both the videos and aggregated reports to have huge benefit
Cheers for this, always useful to hear of new tools to try out…will be interesting to find out how much you can get from not having to pay to start with.
More comments from simoncolleyFind me on Facebook | Twitter
Thanks for sharing this info with us. Sounds like a great tool that will improve my blog. The video aspect is a awesome for showing how users browse your site.
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