Review of ClickTale Web Visitor Video and Analytics Service

In the Internet marketing community, I’ve heard it said of someone being a “fanatical tester”, or a “really bad tester” and other with a true confession, “I don’t test like I should…or at all”.  Testing in the sense of making changes to product offers, product pages, sales letters, or web pages where you are interested in having visitors choose a specific course of action.  You find a winning page design, website copy, or graphic placement, and you always try to beat it.  With free services like Google Analytics or Google Website Optimizer, the barriers to testing are slim to none, although time is always a constraint.  As useful as these services may be , they don’t show you what a users sees and how these users interact with your site, only a video of a user visiting your site could reveal that.  That’s where ClickTale comes in.

Record Web Page Sessions with ClickTale Service

I recently had a conversation with one of the head guys at ClickTale which I recorded, and uploaded to YouTube.  Below is the YouTube video on ClickTale if you want to check it out (includes video of web-visitor in action):

What ClickTale Does

ClickTale records web visitor sessions to a given website.  They call it In-Page Web Analytics.  Essentially customers of their service can:

• Watch movies of visitors browsing sessions to analyze their behavior.
• See Scrolling heatmaps of where visitors look, and how far they scroll down a web page.
• Observe Link Analytics of every interaction, hover, hesitation time, and etc.
• Analyze Webforms giving website owners better understanding of problem fields in webforms that cause visitors to leave the page.

How ClickTale is Helping Online Marketers

During my evaluation of the product I gathered information to help me:

• Tweak and tune landing pages, and placement of webforms
• Improve conversions of online webforms (one of my forms was totally broken!)
• Get a better understanding what content is most interesting to users

While I didn’t yet do it, I plan on putting ClickTale on my shopping cart, so I might better understand shopping cart abandonment on my ecommerce site.  Learn more about ClickTale offer for MarketingProfessor readers here.

What I Like About ClickTale

• Simple javascript that is installed on website or blog.  I was literally up and running reviewing videos of visitors in a few minutes.
• New Features Clicktale is constantly improving the product, just before recording the call with Sharon (above YouTube Video), he showed me some features forthcoming, and gave me an idea where they are heading.  During my testing period (2 months), there were several new features introduced (didn’t have to do anything to benefit from these)
• Proven, many companies have faded from view during the global economic downturn, ClickTale’s value to customers continues to grow, and social web analytic’s (video) is important for the survival of any online business.  Besides that the product has been in the marketplace for about 3 years.  Register Here

What I Don’t Like About ClickTale

• User interface is not as intuitive as it could be.  May not be a problem for most, but my history in software product management, leaves me be a bit picky with these things.
• This relates to the user interface point, it will take a little time to get used to the program, and learn it’s features (some of the most powerful features are a bit buried).  My hope is, their track record of delivering new features will be that they will continue to improve the interface.

Bottomline on ClickTale Web Analytics Product

If you run a website as a brochure, and have no optins, or ecommerce, this product won’t make much sense to you.  It is geared more for those who understand the value of testing webpages for max conversions and sales.  For them it is an incredible value.

Special offer for ClickTale Available

Sharon and his team at ClickTale have put together a special offer for MarketingProfessor.com readers and subscribers (if you have joined the site (newsletter subscriber) you may have seen the notice come via email).   It is already a great value from the main page, but I appreciate what they put together with you in mind.  Get the full scoop here.

Thought’s and Feedback: Questions about this service, or have your own experience you’d like to share.  Go ahead and add to the conversation by chiming in with the comments boxes below.