I spoke today at Interactive Minds’ September event, specifically on metrics.
The talk consisted of two of my favourite metrics tools. This post is about Clicktale, a brilliant usability and conversion tool.
Funnily enough while reviewing my notes, I saw a posting from @franksting talking about measuring readers, not visitors on his blog.
Amongst a raft of other great functions within the product, attention, scroll depth and link analysis as well as engagement time are all expressed using colourful screen overlays. Heat maps for eye tracking and attention measurement charts enable such visualisation of whether people are actually reading the content of a blog.
One of my favourite features is the recorded views. While these are only useful with a trained eye, and in combination with the more advanced summary data, they provide real time testing of your site.
With the ability to view versions you can see the significant difference between different examples being A/B tested, so not only can you see actual click patterns, but you can see the complete user interaction with the page (and content).
Previously we have used this to identify where users have engaged more in the centre of a home page, and avoided a menu, only to use a completely different behaviour within a site. While this goes against some schools of thought on site wide consistency, knowing it enabled specific change to be made to improve the functionality of the home page and simplify it.
Tools such as Clicktale, when used correctly can enable a highly focused web site design that puts content exactly where users want it. What better way to maximise your efforts, ensuring that not only enticing content is generating the clicks, but also you aren’t creating endless content with a blind disregard for its suitability to your audience.
The conversion analysis tools that measure direct effectiveness of individual forms, and how they convert, is a three dimensional view above the funnel type of visualisation Google Analytics provides. This report shows how long each field is interacted with, specific drop out points, refilled fields and a raft of information that can be compared across form versions to ensure you stop dropping users.
You can run it free for a sample, but the paid versions are well worthwhile and compared to paid user studies of a site, and the time delays in getting results collated, this product certainly puts the power back into a webmasters hands.
I know I haven’t been using it enough of late, but having to sit back and evaluate the data we collect, has refreshed my enthusiasm into extending its reach into our sites.
Well that’s what I reckon! What tools do you love to use for analysing your sites?
