Wouldn't it be cool if there was some way you could sit invisibly next to each of your website visitors and watch as they interact with your website?  Think of the potential optimizations you could make!  Maybe you'd see repeated visitors getting lost after entering your site using "xyz" keyword.  You could tweak your content and then retest.  Did your changes help, hurt or make no difference at all?

Well, believe it or not - visitor screen recording and monitoring is possible and it doesn't require you going to some fancy lab.  Big businesses have always had the ability to set up focus groups and labs for user testing, but until recently such things were unheard of for small medium sized businesses.

Introducing ClickTale: Cost Effective Screen Recording

ClickTale is so cool that we've made it a standard feature with Filtered Analytics, our standard marketing measurement and website tracking service.  By placing small codes at the top and bottom of each page of your website - just like Google Analytics - you can record every visitor's interaction with your site.  Everything happens in near real time and there are all sorts of actionable takeaways that come from analyzing the data.

Take a look at this:

This is a page on one of Blue Corona's websites about Yellow Page advertising. 

On one of our old websites, we had downloadable case studies and one of them was about the efficacy of Yellow Page advertising.

When we built a new website, we ditched the PDF's in favor of plain HTML. 

Well, the visitor in the screen recording to the left came to our website after searching "yellow page case studies file type:pdf" - when we watched them go through the plain HTML page they were clearly skimming the text with their mouse - likely looking for the PDF download. 

Actionable Takeaways from Screen Recording

After several minutes of frustration (a guess, but probably accurate from watching their rapid back and forth mouse movements), they left our site.  After watching several repeat visitors react exactly the same way, maybe we should add those downloadable PDF case studies to each page of the website that currently includes the HTML version of the case study?  That'd be a good test don't you think? 

Will these changes make a difference?  We can't say right now, but tools like ClickTale allow us to answer this question with near 100% certainty within a few weeks!

Many website analytics tools give you the ability to view clickstream data - how visitors progress through your website.  However, very few do it the way that ClickTale does.  Visual learners will find ClickTale's heat maps, hover maps, attention reports, etc. incredibly insightful. 

If you're looking for a great tool to optimize your website, I can't recommend ClickTale enough.  Of course, like every tool - it's only as valuable as the person using it!  Many business owners are simply too busy to sit at their desk watching visitor interactions with their website. 

If want help getting tools like ClickTale set-up on your site, you'd like training on how to use them or you'd like a "do-it-for-me" solution to optimizing your website, let's talk!  Call us at 1.800.696.4690.

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