ClickTale – Understand Your Visitors Better by Spying on Them
September 26, 2007 |
ClickTale sells itself by saying you can "record your visitors' every action as they browse your website". The service is remotely-hosted on their servers, and can be installed in about 5 minutes on your website – just copy/paste 2 small pieces of javascript code. Using the data it records, you can visually see how your visitors move their cursors across your website, see where they click exactly, how long they view each section on your website (color coded "heatmaps"), how long they hover their mouse over a link, and a lot more. Think of it like a logger/spyware for EVERYTHING you do on a website that implements it's technology.
It focuses on 4 scrolling map "heatmaps":
- Attention: Average time page area was viewed by the visitors who saw it.
- Visitors: Number of visitors who viewed this page area
- Total time: Total time all visitors viewed this page area
- Pageviews: Number of pageviews recorded at every area on the page
It also records and analyses several links, such as:
- Hovers over Links: Number of mouse hovers (the percent of total hovers)
- Hovers to Clicks: Percentage of mouse hovers that click
- Time To Click: Average time from page load to click
- Hesitation: Average time from beginning of hover to click
- Avg Hover Order: Average order the link was hovered over by visitors
Pretty cool, huh? By knowing this data you can place advertising in areas frequently seen, placing more ads on the pages frequented more, see what pages your visitors like/dislike, etc. The plans range from being Free (100 recordings/week) to $99/month (100 recordings/day). Not too bad considering you can make really good money by understanding your visitor's actions better.
Here are some screenshots if you're not interested in signing up just yet. The numbers in the gray box are the metrics mentioned above:
There are also similar services like this: CrazyEgg (doesn't track mouse movement though), TapeFailure, RobotReplay – all of which say they record visitor's anonymously, and don't record passwords entered. However, when I checked my ClickTale account I noticed I could view any particular user's activity and also view their IP address (which anyone can easily track down with using the proper software). Although they say they don't record passwords, they certainly could very easily…along with credit card and other secure information too!
One must agree though that these services are quite new and they have really good potential to better serve your members and advertisers. However, is the idea of recording EVERY movement on a website worth it?
This post was written for Profy iPhone competition by Mark D'Souza, recent graduate with a Bachelor of Applied technology degree in Software development. He loves technology and tries to be an adopter of it (if it's not too expensive).
@Julie:
Sites may say so in their privacy policy, so check there. Some sites I noticed don't mention it anywhere but looking through the site's code I found it.
@Alexei:
Yeah, I don't see banks and other secure sites using this as, well, it's not necessary. What the user needs to try and understand is to:
a/ trust the site they're entering personal info on
b/ create unique passwords that are not used elsewhere (and use a password manager like roboform).
Btw, I didn't know your site tracks passwords. I would find that the most scariest among everything else as many people tend to use the same passwords everywhere.