What Are Your Visitors Up To?

I recently found out about ClickTale, a company that intriguingly calls its product a “Web Analytics Revolution”. It is a web-based platform for tracking what your visitors are doing on your site – which links they click on, where does their mouse hover and how are forms being interacted with. All this data is recorded and then presented to you in the form of movies, heatmaps and funnels. It is pretty informative and very easy to set up (just like getting Google Analytics) so I encourage you to try ClickTale’s free demo. It is quite limited, as most demos are, but about enough to get an idea about the product and to make me move a button on one of my hobby sites.

Now, this is not a paid article. Maybe I should swear here to prove the point? Or maybe not. In any case, what I really like about ClickTale is that it’s web based. Until now I imagined Usability Testing as an expensive, time-consuming, infrequent excercise. At IWOOT we did one with Webcredible (shit, I’m doing it again!) and it was extremely valuable. Still, it is not feasable to keep running a full-scale test every other month – even the polite Webcredibles would probably not want us permenantly in the lab eating their crisps. In comes ClickTale, or any other similar tool. It can let you to keep an eye on your usability performance in-house in between expert reviews at quite a competitive cost. So well done to ClickTale for filling in this gap, their solution looks nifty indeed.

UPDATE: It seems that other people are thinking along the lines of ClickTale. Paul Smith has highlighted a free script that tracks clicks over on his blog. A quick Google search reveals that there is a  number of solutions available, from free and paid scripts, to paid services like ClickTale. Webmasters have never been so spoiled!