ClickTale

CLICKTALE

ClickTale is a web metrics tool focused on the digital consumer experience and specifically aims to maximize revenues by optimizing the way people experience the digital world (clicktale.com). The goal for Clicktale is to ensure that clients understand the how and why of their profit story, carefully looking into the intricate details that dictate an increase or decrease in revenues. 

Using both a qualitative and a quantitative approach, ClickTale allows you to drill down a converted customer’s actions to the recorded browser sessions of individual users and back out to ‘7 types of heatmaps featuring detailed statistics on every part of every page or form(clicktale.com, 2014).’ 

Clicktale has features to integrate into marketing software, allowing cross-referencing campaigns and return on investment by allowing you to analyze and optimize website performance and usability.

Some of the largest corporations in the world depend on ClickTale as part of their web metrics and analytics solutions, including Walmart, Lenovo, CBS, and T-Mobile. 

Clicktale has grown at over 5,553% over a five-year period, giving it recognition as one of the fastest growing companies in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (Clicktale.com, 2014).

Clickale differs from other web metrics solutions by providing analytics on what they call the entire ‘digital customer experience.’ Rather than simply measuring what happens with visitors moving between pages, Clicktale gives insight into what customers are doing within each page. This is as detailed as tracing mouse movements and recording keystrokes.

Page reports give a comprehensive look at what’s working on each page, to provide an even deeper understanding of pages that are doing their job, and those that might need to be fired.

These reports include (clicktale.com, 2014):

• Most and Least Engaging Pages: Where are visitors spending their time?
• Most and Least Clicked Pages Is the design easy to use and navigate?
• Most and Least Errored Pages Are errors causing visitors to bounce?
• Least and Most Scrolled Pages Are pages too long?
• Slowest and Fastest Loading Pages Are the pages too pixel-heavy, causing long load times?

Another big focus for ClickTale is conversion. If your web metrics solution is focused on revenues and profits, then conversions are critical. If your website is meant to convert to sales, then the return on investment of any campaign or efforts driving customers to the website need to be analyzed. The Conversion funnel reports show where customers are leaving, combined with video session playback gives a well-rounded look at where customers drop out.

Conversion is also understood better by studying link engagement and interaction. Eight unique behavioral reports reveal comprehensive information about your visitors' hovers, clicks, hesitation time, and visit order (Clicktale.com, 2014). If your goal is gathering information or gaining subscribers, then a report on Form Analytics gives insight into the conversion of a contact request.

Session playbacks give a visual feel for being in the ‘character’s shoes’ so to speak, and following their behaviors. Session playbacks are also available for mobile devices, to improve conversion rates likely caused by design, maximize customer engagement by understanding which images are attracting attention, which links are yielding results, and which content is receiving response.

ClickTale’s unique Session Playback feature simulates gestures, zoom capabilities, scrolls and tilts, replicating every interaction with your mobile site. The playable videos of user sessions are viewed on a screen that imitates the actual size of each device, giving you the True-to-Life™ experience of individual visitors (Clicktale.com, 2014).’ 

In comparison to Google Analytics, Clicktale provides a lot of the same information, however digs a bit deeper in most, and also adds a higher level of ‘getting in the customer’s head’ with its heat mapping and session recordings. Clicktale has drill down features in almost every category that takes the customer’s actions further and provides better understanding of the metric and how it might be evaluated for change. 

Both Google Analytics as well as Clicktale provide the basics such as:

·       Analysis Tools

·       Content Analytics

·       Mobile Analytics

·       Social Analytics

·       Conversion Analytics

·       Advertising Analytics

Google Analytics and ClickTale are primarily intended for freelancers, large enterprises, mid size business, non profits, public administrations, small business. They also both support desktop, Android, and iPhone/iPad.

Google Analytics supports the following countries:  Asia, Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Germany, India, Japan, Latin America, Middle-East and Africa, United Kingdom, United States. It also supports the following languages:  Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian.

ClickTale supports the following countries: Asia, Australia, Canada, China, Europe, India, Latin America, Middle-East and Africa, United Kingdom, United States. It, however, only supports English.

If your site generates 10 million or fewer hits per month, then Google Analytics is free. If your site generates more than 10 million hits per month, then we offer increased limits as part of Google Analytics Premium(getapp.com, 2014). Large corporations may pay as much as starting at $150,000/year for the advance Google Analytics features. ClickTale has some features available for free, but to get the most of the software, you have to subscribe for $99/month.

ClickTale delivers innovative In-Page Web Analytics that reveal the mystery of what visitors actually do inside website pages.

Key Features of ClickTale that are beyond the capabilities of Google Analytics:

·       Video recordings

·       Mouse move heatmaps

·       Click heatmaps

·       Attention heatmaps

·       Conversion funnels

·       Campaign tracking

Overall, you get more from Google Analytics for free, but once you move forward or go over the hits limits, the Google Analytics can begin to get a bit pricey. ClickTale appears to be affordable for even the small-mid size business that wants to understand the customer experience and have the value in what ClickTale offers in its session movies, conversion drill downs, and heatmaps. Using the two together might be a very successful avenue to achieve analytic and metrics goals, especially if you’re a small business and can maximize the free components of each.

ONE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM OR MANY?

ONE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM OR MANY?

            This question can be answered in several ways, with advantages and disadvantages to picking one road or the other, but while the decision to focus on one or many is debatable, it really comes down to resources.

            Big corporate giants have resources. They can designate an entire department solely to the management and cohesiveness of its social media platform. This might have one senior level manager keeping a finger on the rest of the group, ensuring the messages across all platforms are accurate and consistent. One employee might work on Twitter all day, tweeting and managing ads, and looking for relevant hashtags to join conversation. Another will have the same duties for Facebook, and YouTube, and Instagram, and LinkedIn, and Pinterest, and so on. Wherever relevant and adding value to the corporation, a resource can be placed in that area.

            For the big corporations that have the resources to spare, it is advantageous to be everywhere, linking the media platforms together to raise awareness and increase connections across the various sources. If it is possible, to have a presence everywhere and get the exposure of all of these platforms linked together, that can have an amazing impact.

            For a small business, it is much more difficult to try to keep up with all of it. Generally, one person must manage the social media aspects of the company, and most of the time, that person is managing several other areas of the marketing as well. In some cases, one person is managing all of the marketing in the company.

            If your company can’t afford to divide and conquer, then conquer with just one or two. If your company is a start-up, in those first 3-5 years of businesses, or just starting up in the social media realm, then choose just one, and focus all of the attention to gaining a large and captive audience in that one spot.

            So, first and foremost, decide which is the most likely you can rule in your industry (or at least claim a top spot); keep up with enough that you engage a willing and hungry audience.

            Making the choice of which to go with can be difficult. Twitter is great for everyone, and has an active participation of individuals and all kinds of businesses. Twitter is great for locking in on conversations, joining in and using hashtags to further the conversation or involve others. Twitter can be effective, but only if you can engage several times a day. Instagram is great for food, fashion, or personalities (thenextweb.com, 2014). Sharing visual content once a day is sufficient and connects to a target audience. LinkedIn is a focus for business to business, or human resource companies or departments. Facebook, like Twitter, has everyone, individuals and businesses. The engagement is similar to Twitter, although generally more visuals, however the post frequency requirement is a bit less, usually once or twice per day. Google+ seems to be big for business to business and bloggers (thenextweb.com, 2014), and has a similar interaction to Facebook, with the added benefit of integrating keyword and search engine optimization on Google to increase presence on both. Google+ can be a great for businesses since a lot of the informal conversation is left for Facebook, and most of the interaction is on a professional level. YouTube is great for those that have time to create engaging and conversational video content, including ads, advice, and information. Many small businesses need heavier resources to create enough videos to gain an audience expecting consistent content. If you are a sole proprietor, or small business in food, fashion, or especially any DIY company, Pinterest will be beneficial, primarily for women-oriented products, since the ratio of women to men on Pinterest is 4:1 (thenextweb.2014).

            Once you’ve identified which social media platform would prove the most value versus time spent, as well as the platform the company can slowly become a winner, an organized approach must be created and implemented to reach that goal.

            One woman has built a very strong case for giving one platform everything. And her argument is quite strong.

            Megan Auman is one of those people that have built a business doing something they love. She designs jewelry, is an entrepreneur and educator, and provides excellent advice to the small business owner that is trying to carve out their market.

            The first point recognizes that Andrew Carnegie (the second richest man in history), gave this advice: “‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ is wrong. I tell you ‘put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.’” Carnegie goes on to say that it’s much easier to carry (and not drop) one basket than many (designinganmba.com,2014).

            With too many social media platforms, the results are slow across the board, efforts spread too thin, so burn out is common, and the ball is dropped, often just on the brink of something great happening. We are impatient by nature; we hope to post something and see an increase in that interaction immediately. But give it a year before your expectations seek any type of traction, and then grab hold.

            As Megan points out, finding the best way to connect one on one with your customers is key. So if you discover a social media platform that can direct people to your website and get them to subscribe to your email list, that is your best conversational asset. They might miss your ‘tweet’ or the Facebook algorithms might bypass you on their news feed, but if you can get their most engaging point of contact (email), then you will be able to reach them no matter what.

            After giving that some thought, I think for small businesses, it could be very product or service dependent, or possibly personality based. You’re likely to spend the most time on a social media platform that you integrate well with, you feel comfortable with, and that gives you enjoyment, whether that be from success or from the connections you make.

            As a small business owner, the investigation of the best social media outlet has been well underway. Most of all, the realization is concrete that it is an investment of time in people, and engaging them to believe that it is worthwhile to make an investment of their time into your business.

            So, to conclude, the argument persists that big corporations can afford to go for all of it, but the small business owner should nail down one social media outlet that will connect with the audience on the most personal level to get the most engaging interactions, subscriptions, and email!

References:

Auman, Megan. Why you should focus on winning one social media platform. DesigninganMBA.com, April, 2014. Retrieved from http://designinganmba.com/2014/04/28/why-you-should-focus-on-winning-one-social-media-platform/.

 

Van Grove, Jennifer. Top 5 Social Media Tips for C-Suite Execs. Mashable.com, 2010. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2010/05/11/social-media-tips-execs/.

 

Chitwood, Luke. Which social media platform is best for your business? Thenextweb.com, March, 2014. Retrieved from http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/03/05/social-media-platform-best-business/.

 

 

UNIQUE VISITORS

UNIQUE VISITORS (FOUNDATIONAL)

            Customer retention is super important to any business, of course, but gaining those new prospects, leads, or purchasing customers is top of mind as well. So seeking the best methods, techniques and tools to bring those unique visitors to the website is a metric that should be given attention on a very regular basis, even daily for many companies, possibly even hourly for some.

            When pageview numbers go downhill, typically this means that in unison, the number of unique visitors is going flat. Since most users are searching out product or service needs via browsers, two areas in particular have huge impact on keeping that unique visitor number heading uphill: content and search engine optimization.

            One travel company noticed a big decline in unique visitors and the overall economic health of the company was moving right alongside. This particular company decided on Adobe Site Catalyst (a.k.a. Site Cat) to identify keyword areas where content could be optimized (Axis41.com, 2014). 

            For this travel industry client of Axis41, internet users seeking this type of expertise seemed to primarily use the keywords ‘condo’ and ‘bedroom’ in their searches. The company strived to add condo pages that included the word bedroom as much as possible to provide a combination of the most desired and most used keywords. Each page also had a call-to-action to directed the user to the booking page.

            Within a month of the new page launch, page views increased by 191%, and unique visits increased by 206% (Axis41.com, 2014). The company also added content relevant to the condominium property itself, rather than an overload of information about the surrounding area and the city. Initially, the company believed that content regarding the location of the property would be of interest, and the metrics proved that prospective customers were searching on qualities of the condominium itself. So, once again, content (and accurately and frequently updated content), directs the unique visitors to the site.

            Using an analytics tool to determine the number of unique visitors clicking through to the website shows the number of actual people that visit, and which, in turn, can provide another metric, a relative denominator for determining how many of these visitors actually equal a conversion. Does the unique visitor browse around and leave? Do they come back again later, or even repeatedly? How many visits does it take to convert to a purchase or a sales lead? The unique visitor is the beginning, and there is no end without the beginning, which makes that unique visitor so critical to the success of the website.

            Another company that blew unique visitors through the roof with content marketing is Upworthy.com. As of March of 2014, they were the ‘Fastest Growing Media Company of All Time (Yazamoinsights.com, 2014). 

            Just check out this comparison to others like Huffington Post and Business Insider.

(Courtesy of Yazamoinsights.com, 2014)

Wow, right? Crazy growth, all due to attention in the detail of content. They focus on what they consider to be meaningful content (nothing empty or without a message), and have managed to obtain over 53 million unique visitors. Initially, their primary directive was to share a landing page that could be easily shared on social media platforms. The content also led to capturing an email address (retention!). There was call-to-action all over the place, whether it be to share, or join, or provide an email.

(Courtesy of Yazamoinsights.com, 2014)

            Upworthy.com believes in the testing, and learning what they can to implement the best content and design to encourage engagement, and sharing. They are constantly testing, suggesting content based on visitor’s preferences, and kill it on social media sharing.

            Upworthy.com is a probably the best example I could find of a company that kept analysis at the forefront of all online decisions, and knew that they could never just kick back and watch it all happen, because it would be constantly changing, and to increase those unique visitors, they would have to keep up, keeping the content fresh and relevant, and test, test, test.

References:

Increase Unique Visitors by 206% with Content Marketing: a Travel Industry Case Study. Axis41.com, January, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.axis41.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/increase-unique-visitors-by-206-with-content-marketing-a-travel-industry-case-study/.

 

Ellens, Jeremy. Upworthy's 53.5M Unique Monthly Visitors Content Marketing Case Study. Yazamoinsights.com, March, 2014. Retrieved from http://www.yazamoinsights.com/optimization/upworthy-content-marketing-case-study.

 

CONVERSION

CONVERSION

As a small business owner, keeping an eye on the bottom line requires analyzing each piece to the puzzle and determining what might need to be adjusted going into the next day, or month, or quarter, or year. Sales numbers are generally a key factor of understanding if things are working or if they are not, but whether sales are busting through the roof, or falling through the floor, understand why is critical.

For companies using online advertising, understanding conversion of those advertisements is the best way to understand if the return on that marketing investment is assisting the company in meeting sales goals, or falling short.

In other words, why run internet ads at all if you aren’t going to try to optimize those conversions to lead to a click-through to a website or product which will then lead to a sale. A few points about conversion to consider (blog.kissmetrics.com, 2012):

 • You have 0-8 seconds to make a compelling headline and landing page. After 8 seconds, the majority of visitors leave.

• Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy.

• The more landing pages you have, the more leads you are likely to get.

• Product videos can increase purchases of the product by 144%.

• A 1 second delay in your site speed can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

• Experimental testing (A/B testing; testing users against two different versions to discover which group converts most) is becoming the preferred method that has brought a lot of the companies the most success; only 61% of companies do less than 5 tests per month. Through A/B testing you also learn about the visitors themselves, such as visitor segments which consistently perform better with specific content (blog.hubspot.com, 2012).

There is a conversion factor to get the user to click on the advertisement through to the desired page of the website, and in many cases, this is a home page (such as in awareness campaigns). If you are trying to reach new prospects who may not have heard of your company at all, and intend to convert them into buyers, then the home page needs to have conversion elements within itself. One example of this was discovered by a case study done on Hubspot.

 A software company (which apparently wished to remain anonymous), increased traffic to its site every year, but the conversion rate was stuck below 2% (blog.hubspot.com, 2012). This was primarily an issue due the fact that the bounce rate was over 30% higher than the industry average.

A redesign of the website alone increased the conversion by 106%!

(Courtesy of Blog.hubspot.com, 2012)

Three elements in particular had the most impact to the increase in conversion from the homepage, either to sales leads or to purchase. The company knew that 80% of its visitors were unique visitors, never having visited the page and likely having no understanding of the precise and varied services the company had to offer. Nothing on that home page assisted the visitors in choosing the product best for their needs. The company just said a few things about itself, and expected the user to figure out the rest.

Using a home page headline to state exactly what the company can do for the user, rather than simply a statement of what the company does, was a major factor in the conversion increase. Next, a call-to-action is the path to conversion.

On the new home page design, the company showed an illustration of a prominent whitepaper, with the bright red button next to it to download the whitepaper and learn more about how the company can meet the user’s needs. A secondary call-to-action allows the user to click-through to the website’s product section to immediately begin to breakdown the different products.

Image use is a third primary element. Many companies just throw up stock images for the sake of giving the home page visual effects, color, and design. However, too many images for the sake of having images can clutter the home page, overwhelm the user, and cause them click away before even understanding the how the company can offer value. Instead, only use images relevant to the value and benefits that can be offered to the user, and keep it simple.

Conversion is the center of the website, regardless of what the goal of that conversion might be, so constant testing and assessment of the conversion rates are critical to optimizing the website’s performance and meeting goals.


 References: Meher, Jessica. Extreme Homepage Makeover: How to Increase Your Conversion Rate 106%. Hubspot.com, March, 2012. Retrieved from http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31104/Extreme-Homepage-Makeover-How-to-Increase-Your-Conversion-Rate-106.aspx. 

Bulygo, Zach. Work, Sean. What The Highest Converting Websites Do Differently. Kissmetrics.com, 2012. Retrieved from https://blog.kissmetrics.com/what-converting-websites-do/.