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ClickTale “Sit On Their Shoulder” Analytics

May 5th, 2009 • By: Chris von Nieda • On-Site SEO, Tips

When most of us think about website analytics we think of charts, graphs, numbers and probably Google right? What if I told you there is a company called ClickTale who has the technology to put a camera on your website visitors shoulder pointed at their monitor and feed back to you a video of exactly what they did while they browsed your website. Would that be of value to you? I think so!

Think about it…how great would it be to actually "watch" what they clicked on, how long they stayed on a page, what path they took through your website and if they encountered any problems along the way. Better yet watch as they fill out a form or add items to their shopping cart and "see" exactly what they are doing. You are probably asking yourself now, how could this be? No one can do that? That is too good to be true! Think again…I give you "ClickTale". If I have already peaked your interest and you can’t stand it anymore you can visit the clicktale website now. However if you would rather not leave yet and have about 2 minutes here is a Video for you to watch to learn more about this amazing service!

We tried out the free trial ClickTale offers back when we upgraded this site to what you see now and we learned one important lesson; just by watching a few videos ClickTale generated for us we learned that a number of our visitors were trying to click on some orange graphics of arrows trying to get more information about our services. The problem was that the arrows were not clickable! They were static graphics. As a result we updated our website so that those orange arrows now lead to an information form our visitors can fill out to contact us. To see the arrows check out our quality link building page.

I showed a few members of the staff some of the video’s ClickTale recorded and although from a business perspective they "get it" some typical comments I heard were "that’s creepy" and "isn’t that a violation of your privacy"! Some people may feel that way, in fact it crossed our minds that websites that use ClickTale should have it disclosed that "every keystroke is being recorded by video". You’ll have to decide for yourself if that kind of intelligence is valuable to you and your business but we think it’s very cool amazing technology and provides incredibly useful information other analytics systems can not provide. Not even the almighty Google Analytics!

I’d appreciate knowing what you think about ClickTale. Leave your comments below.

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