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.