Spy On Your Site Visitors With ClickTale
Over the course of the past few months, our designers and strategists have been hard at work brainstorming and creating a new centresource.com. We’re nearing the completion of this site and can’t wait to share it with you! One thing that we found to be helpful when strategizing the format and features for the new web site were observations that we made while using a tool called ClickTale.
ClickTale is a monitoring service that “delivers innovative In-Page Web Analytics that reveal the mystery of what visitors actually do inside website pages, allowing you to analyze and optimize website performance and usability.” Not only does it track visits and clicks, but it visibly records a user’s mouse movements on each screen during a visit. You can actually click “play” and sit back and spy on someone’s actions during a visit.
Initially, we set up ClickTale to monitor users habits on our SEM landing pages to ensure that we’d been accurately predicting the amount of time that a user would devote to the text area vs. a portfolio gallery vs. a conversion contact form. Here are some of the interesting observations that we made:
- Users were not clicking around in our landing page portfolio slideshow as much as expected.
- Users were not clicking on our contact form “Discuss Your Project” button very frequently. When they did, they almost immediately left.
- We this text on our homepage that says ““…inviting you to think bigger about what interactive can do for your organization.” The “bigger” and “interactive” words are highlighted in green…and people think they’re links! We had no idea.
- Users were actually reading the text on our landing pages, but were not inspired to reach out to contact us immediately.
After making these observations, here are some of the resulting decisions that were made:
- Contact forms would be placed directly into pages whenever possible instead of being a click away.
- We’d take advantage of the opportunity to make different colored text exist as easter egg links…to capture every click possible.
- We’d take steps to make our content text more actionable and inspiring.
- People like both images of and talk about our work. We’d make sure to feature our portfolio images as much as we feature ourselves talking about how great our work is.
When the new centresource.com strategy came about, the visitor habits observed in our ClickTale monitoring helped us to make key decisions about where and how to feature items within the new centresource.com. Be sure to keep that in mind when checking out the new site in the not toooo distant future!
Side Note: ClickTale has a free temporary trial available. I’d wholeheartedly suggest that anyone interested go try it out. It’s quite fun to watch what people do when visiting your site. If you are considering a site revamp and want an expert to help you make your ClickTale observations actionable, give me a call. I’d love to help you spy on your visitors! 615-313-7679 x125
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http://www.facebook.com/people/Nicholas-Holland/691672072 Nicholas Holland