Google PlusFacebook iconTwitter icon+44 113 260 4010 contact@branded3.com

Blogstorm »

Film your visitors & improve your forms with ClickTale

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.

clicktale

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.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 9:54am ON Thursday, 16 July 2009

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • aroundtheweb1980

    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.

  • http://www.webstrategy360.com Web Strategy 360

    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.

  • http://www.crearedesign.co.uk Creare-Website-Design

    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.

  • http://www.webstrategy360.com Web Strategy 360

    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.

  • http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk SEO-Doctor

    The 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.

  • Pingback: Cool articles – SEO, blogging, internet marketing(july13-july19 2009) « Stefanm, my link collection

  • http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk Luci

    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?

  • http://www.paulstallard.wordpress.com Paul Stallard

    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.

  • Dani

    Amazing service. I found both the videos and aggregated reports to have huge benefit

  • http://www.absoluteinternetmarketing.co.uk/web_marketing simoncolley

    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.

  • http://www.takefreeonlinesurveysformoney.com/ Paid Survey Sites

    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.

Feedburner Users

Tags

.Net AJAX Android apps Bing Branded3 C# CMS competwition conversion CSS development e-commerce email F# Facebook features Gmail Google HTML HTML5 IE9 interactive internet Internet World JavaScript Leeds Digital Festival Microsoft mobile web PHP rankings SEO smartphones social media Twitition Twitter URL user experience web design web usability Windows Windows 8 WordPress YouTube Zend Framework

© 2013 Branded3 Search Limited Company reg. no. 06479012, All rights reserved.
Part of

St Ives Group Logo