ClickTale is one of my Top 3 web analysis tools.  Its power and quick payoff are huge.  I wish I had more time to truly exploit it on a regular basis, I believe in it so much.

My Typical Use

When I’m first initiating a customer engagement after making sure they have basic analytics set up, I’ll install ClickTale on their site for 2 weeks.  During this time there will be no changes made to the site.  We’ll collect data on the users of the site in a way that is more advanced and telling than straight Google Analytics.Here are the 3 features that have sold me on the product and make me fork over $99/month (this link will get you the Bronze Plan for $79/month):

Recorded User Sessions (Videos)

After you’ve tagged all pages of your site, you can literally watch one by one as your users move their mouse, type into your forms and click un-clickable images.  By the way, I love how they’ve coined them as videos, very approachable and easily understood.In fact there is always at least one ah-ha moment within the first 5 sessions we review where we find a significant usability problem with the customer’s site.  As you present your proposal to a client, your VP or Marketing or your CEO, it’s always nice to know you can count on at least one instant win that sometime pays for all of your costs.Once you’ve come down from the recording high, though, the filtering that you can do to focus on failures (see the jserror below), how different browser visitors experience your website and even engagement time, is where the tool really pays off.

One of my favorite deep dives is to watch recording of users who came in through what I consider to be highly qualified organic search terms, but had very short (if not bouncing) visits.  I want to see their screen, watch their mouse move and attempt to put myself in their shoes to determine why they didn’t stay.

Mouse Move Heatmaps

This is total eye candy and one of the easy ways to win over those skeptical of your analysis.  Of course, you’ll need to follow-up with your hard core recommendations, but presentation is everything and heatmaps are a great first slide.But these are not just static heatmaps.  And they really go beyond eye candy.  After two weeks of data you’ll know so much about how effective your web pages are that your client or boss will be converted and become engaged in learning more about how to improve your website.

You have to upgrade to the enterprise level to get heatmaps beyond just the one available in the Bronze package.  That package only maps your most popular page, usually the home page.  There's a big jump in price beyond the Bronze package.  So I recommend starting with the Bronze package first to make sure it's what you want.

But as you’ll learn, not only can you quickly see where the visitor's mouse moves (with its 80% correlation to eye movement), but you can turn layers/filtering on and off to help you find what’s working and what may be causing confusion to your visitors.

Form analysis

This is another monster.  In addition to friendlier reporting on your conversion metrics, the tool, when combined with user recording, can really hone in on problems with forms.  Since so many of my clients are focused on lead generation, the completion of a form is the money shot.  Quickly finding holes in their lead funnels can justify months of future work looking for smaller lifts in conversions.

Another Secret Weapon

I would probably pay the $99/month (discounted Bronze Plan for $79/month) for just these 3 features.  They are that empowering.  Other features of the Bronze package that I use less include:

• Scroll reach heatmaps
• Up to 3 domains tracked – perfect number for me
• Click heatmaps
• Link analytics
• Event-based filtering
• Custom email alerts