Analytics Expert Blog

We’ve just opened up ClickTale’s Research Hub, customized to meet all your ebusiness needs. Here, you can gain free access to our latest reference guides, whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, and much more to keep your website customer experience current and converting.

Popular content featured in our Research Hub includes:

• In-depth Industry Whitepapers

• Master Class Webinar Series

• Comprehensive Case Studies

• Expert Q&A Sessions

• And much more!

Discover unique approaches and useful insights to get ahead of your online optimization process. This includes everything from web analytics and emarketing, to usability and design.

Winter conferences are here and we’re already bundled up to go on the road! Whether you are a new ClickTale customer, seasoned ClickTale nerd, or simply a conversion enthusiast, we want to meet you. Have a look at where we’re headed and hopefully we’ll see you at a conference hall near you!

IRWD, Orlando, February 13th -15th

We’re escaping to the warm weather in Orlando, Florida for the Internet Retailer 2012 Conference. 46 expert speakers, 27 conference sessions, 50 exhibits, and 24 consultants all at one conference! Get a free design consultation on your own website! Keynote speakers include Paul Miller from W.W. Grainer Inc, Thomas Ryan, of Threadless.com, Halley Silver, Director of Online Services, King Arther Flour, plus many more.

If you are interested in going, we’re hooking you up with a 25% discount on all passes purchased, with no limit as to how many people register with the discount code. Contact us or comment below for the code!

eMetrics 2012, San Francisco, March 4th-9th

Check us out in San Fran, CA for Jim Stern’s internationally acclaimed eMetrics Marketing Summit and get a head start on your online campaigns! This is an entire event focusing purely on usability, conversion rates, and website performance! Speakers scheduled to appear are some of the biggest and brightest in the industry including Bob Page of eBay, Steve Petitpas of Microsoft, Sharron J. Silva of the American Red Cross, and many others!

We’re giving away discounted tickets, so contact us for more details!

Omniture Summit, Salt Lake City, March 19th-23rd

This Digital Marketing Summit is home to over 1,000 digital marketing, ecommerce and web analytics professionals. Join us at the premier digital marketers event to gain insights into industry specific business challenges and money making best practices. Keynote speakers include the likes of Steve Parker, Jr., Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Levelwing.

Internet Retailing Expo, Birmingham, March 21st-22nd

We conclude our winter conferences in England, where we’re attending the Internet Retailing Expo in Birmingham. Over 150 leading suppliers of ecommerce and multichannel retailers will be there and it’s completely FREE to attend! Get in on all the conference, workshop and expo action, geared specifically towards multichannel online retailers.

Be in Touch!

If you’re going to be at any of these events, let us know! We’d really love to arrange a time to chat or meet up at our booth. Feel free to contact us directly or comment below if you know you are going to be around. Hopefully see you soon!

This past holiday season, Cyber Monday became the single top spending day in history, raking in an impressive $1.25 billion. Little by little ebusinesses are doing their homework, getting a deeper look into the online customer experience, improving site navigation, optimizing online forms, and paying attention to usability and optimal design. Round of applause, please.

Yes, yes, this is all very well and good. But, each new year triggers new web standards and design trends, and 2012 is no different.

Over the past year, ClickTale has worked with and helped an elite group of etravel heavy weights, to get ready for the influx of holiday travel visitor traffic. After gathering over 23 million visitor recordings of data during this time, we have documented, defined, and now we deliver a powerful knowledge base of actionable steps to improve your own site’s performance for 2012 in our Online Travel Best Practices Whitepaper.

For your own free copy of our Online Travel Best Practices, just click HERE.

Website Resolution Countdown

Below, I count down my 7 favorite whitepaper takeaways that can apply to any ebusiness New Year’s resolutions, in any industry.

7. Visualize your visitor data rather than simply collecting it in a vacuum.

Numbers are great for quick data and structured reporting. But numbers can’t explain the customer experience on your site. Heatmaps, conversion funnels, and visitor recordings are all great visual tools that let you observe visitor behavior on your website as it happens.

6. Understand how many search results your visitors are willing to scroll through on a webpage.

**The average visitor only scrolls through 10 search results.

5. Know the difference between your different website visitors. (especially for ecommerce)

a. The Hesitant/Cautious shopper (Just wants to contact you)
b. The Comparison Shopper (Wants the best deal)
c. The Determined Shopper (Just wants to shop)

4. Research your most popular keywords that should be used in your ad word campaigns to effectively structure your paths to conversion from one landing page to the next.

Use segmentation features to break down your visitors and narrow down specific customer profiles.

3. Do not let visitors who arrive from a Google search results page land on another search page on your site.

This will just overwhelm them and send them bouncing.

2. If visitors are quitting in the middle of the form, then you will need to know at which specific fields they are quitting and why to improve conversions.

Form Analytics highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each field, while finding form errors in the process.

And, drumroll, please…

1. Be your own website.

While it is good to learn from the successes of other popular websites, their design might not work in the favor of your own site usability. Popular webpage elements can be placed in altering locations on the page. By analyzing your own visitors’ behavior, you will know which layout works best for your website to encourage conversions.

To read and learn more, see our Online Travel Whitepaper.

We want to hear from you!

Tweet us your thoughts @ClickTale. Let us know what you think and how ClickTale’s guide has helped you with your own website!

Each test version during your a/b testing needs to be an accurate reflection of how users interact with your website. So, instead of going through tens of unnecessary test versions created purely from intuition, save yourself time (and frustration) by visually understanding your visitors’ online behavior.

Visual reporting of the online user experience for a/b testing is best achieved using accessible and easy to use Customer Experience Analytics tools and solutions.

ClickTale’s Guide to A/B Testing – Intuitive Testing with Behavioral Data, clearly explains what to test, how to test, and what to change on your website. Learn how to:

• Use ClickTale to find pages and elements to test

• Set up your own a/b test

• Analyze your test results

• And gain more ideas for testing

The best part…it’s FREE.

Download HERE!

NEW! If you want to get more information and a wider selection of media guides, sign up to ClickTale’s Research Hub. Here you’ll find our latest reference guides, whitepapers, ebooks, webinars, and much more to keep your website customer experience current and converting.

ClickTale is now en Español!

Due to popular demand, ClickTale is now expanding into the Spanish language market, catering to our growing international clientele. We are proud to announce that our new Spanish blog is our first multilingual release.

Here, ClickTale has created a one-stop knowledge hub for everything web analytics, emarketing, usability and design…entirely for Spanish speakers. Although the web analytics industry is continually growing, access to multilingual advanced research and quality data can be hard to come by, especially when discussing cutting edge technology such as Customer Experience Analytics.

ClickTale’s already begun translating and publishing our same dynamic content into Spanish, including research, case studies, and whitepapers, for your own business use.

Please leave us your comments or questions regarding content you wish to see in Spanish.

ClickTale is sponsoring its very own Tweet and Win contest!

How to play: Simply tweet

World-leading user behavior analytics offers free accounts #ClickTale

Continue tweeting right up until the end of the contest. The more you tweet, the higher your chances are to win!

What you win: A six month ClickTale Silver Account…FREE!!

So, start tweeting and may the best tweeter win!

Cyber Monday is all about incredible online deals, and ClickTale is no exception. All day, today, ClickTale is giving away incredible discounts on ALL our paid plans!

These deals are exclusively for our blog readers and twitter followers ,so if you want to get in on a piece of the action, either Tweet @ClickTale, Facebook us, or comment below.

So contact us by Tuesday, November 29, 2011 @ 11:00am EST for your exclusive ClickTale deal and we’ll get back to you within a day.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Do you know how to translate all the extreme color of a heatmap into powerful money making action during your website optimizations? These explosions of color narrate visitor usage patterns on your site to help you achieve the highest ROI with your a/b testing and webpage redesigns. BUT, you have to know what to look for.

Some Like It Hot

When a webpage receives abundant red hot attention from visitors, simply put, visitors want and are encouraged to interact with that particular element or section of the page, whether you intended them to or not. Therefore, it is important to know if certain red areas of high engagement are actually helping or hurting your conversion process.

For many ebusinesses, red hot sections of the page are NOT responsible for increasing website conversion, rather increasing website abandonment.

What should you do?

1. Check to see where visitors are clicking, expecting links where there are none.

2. Decide whether popular webpage elements, specifically which links, are distracting visitors from the major call to actions on the webpage.

3. Find out if the section of the page you originally intended is where visitors are engaging. Does the red hot section include a major call to action on the page?

You may want to make certain text into links or change the appearance of the text so visitors do not expect a link. For those links you do have on the page, determine whether they push visitors down the conversion funnel or hold them back. If any webpage element causes visitors to navigate backwards and get distracted from completing conversion, it should not be a link.

The Cold Hard Truth?

So what does it mean, when a specific area of the page is blue cold and visitors are not engaging? What conclusion(s) can you make?

1. The content is not interesting enough for visitors to interact with. (Often NOT the case)

2. The content is not visible on the page, either hidden to one side of the page or located below the fold. (VERY often the case)

3. The content/webpage elements are irrelevant or not attractive enough to encourage visitors to interact with the page.

What should you do?

Evaluate your webpage. Decide whether webpage elements you value are valued by your visitors as well. Should they be repositioned on the page (moved above the fold or to a different side), or are they in need of a complete redesign? Once you clearly see where visitors are not reaching with their mouse, you know which webpage elements you need to improve.

Remember

Each color on a heatmap does not translate the same way for each element, or each webpage. Red may mean great usability in one area of the page, while it means visitor abandonment trigger in another. So be careful when conducting your own analysis and make sure that you take into account the role of each web element on the page towards customer conversions.

eBusinesses employing ClickTale’s Customer Experience Analytics Suite can now export unique visitor behavioral reports and analyze all data in any reporting system!

What does ClickTale’s exportable data mean for your business?

ClickTale technology stands alone as the leading analytics provider to give you all in-page behavioral data about your customers including mouse moves, clicks, scrolls, attention time, and page transitions. And now all ClickTale customers are able to export this qualitative visitor behavioral data as a convenient data table for integration into their in-house reporting services.

This means that any business metric regarding online behavior, be it the amounts of time visitors engage with your webpages, the number of visitors that only watch half way through a video, visitors who scroll a certain percentage down the page, etc. can be exported and converted into statistics. Now you can include how visitors used your site in your regular data reports in addition to simply how many, as well as other website metrics. These can all be emailed or printed as needed.

What can ClickTale’s Statistics tell you?

ClickTale’s Advanced Filtering feature offers over 23 different and customizable filters to easily build visitor segments/profiles you need to track. In addition, exported reports include an anonymous ID for each visitor which you can use to save groups of visitors you want to keep track of over time.

Here are just some examples of using ClickTale’s exportable reports:

• Profile visitors from a specific marketing campaign (find average fold height, scrolling distance, referrers for subsequent visits, mouse clicks, top entry and exit pages, etc.)

• Create a cohort with Visitor Id’s to track the behavior of a group of specific visitors over time.

• Use Events API to see which specific site elements visitors interact with and how often. This is particularly beneficial to find out what influences purchasers or other browsing segments such as lurkers, researchers, etc.

• Base Heatmaps and Form Analytics on specific profiles using Visitor Id’s, see how visitors from a campaign behaved on different pages of your site over time

• Apply any combination of over 23 different filters such as country, language, traffic source, fold height, and visited pages to build your segments.

Exportable Reports Available to All ClickTale Customers

ClickTale exportable reports are available to all customers. Please contact us if you would like to learn more.

As the lead analyst at ClickTale, I spend most of my time analyzing our website. This means that I’m constantly running A/B tests on our webpages. However, A/B tests offer no context, just a score, and this is a HUGE problem.

We both need behavioral data to understand what our visitors paid attention to, interacted with, and read on each webpage, as well as the after-effects on conversion. Website optimization can then be intelligently based on actual visitor behavior as opposed to simple speculation.

To make a long post short, I’d like to invite you to our upcoming A/B Testing Master Class.

Wednesday, November 16th at 1pm EST
To register, click HERE

Intelligent A/B Testing

In this webinar, we’ll go over exactly how to use ClickTale for A/B testing and answer all of your questions. As a bonus, all registrants will receive a free copy of our “ClickTale Guide to A/B Testing”.

About the Author

Billy is the lead analyst at ClickTale working with some of the internet’s largest websites. His clients have ranged from small business and non-profits to Fortune 500 companies. Billy is a New York University graduate with advanced degrees from NYU and Texas A&M.