If you’ve ever wanted to look over the shoulder of someone visiting your website, you can. ClickTale’s (affiliate version) tagline is “Record. Watch. Understand.” and they literally record a video of a user’s browsing session including:
- The movement of the mouse
- The click of the button
- The scrolling of the page
- The typing of form data
The only piece of data missing from the equation is where the user is actually looking. A video on their homepage provides a quick summary of the service with an actual example, be sure to watch it.
The service offers several other useful tools alongside the basic session video:
- Click Heatmaps (CrazyEgg is a much more affordable solution if you don’t want the session video)
- Form Analytics and Funnels
- Detailed Link Analytics
- Real Time Reporting
I originally used ClickTale several months ago on an e-commerce site to test various aspects of the page. Despite it’s scary tracking power, I have several large caveats regarding the service (though some of these may have changed since I tried it):
- The first is an obvious privacy issue. Most website visitors would be shocked to discover a website had this much power to track their usage. Watch the video, it feels very personal. I don’t think there’s anything here that would go against most privacy policies, but it’s definitely a level above most analytics tracking. I mentioned earlier that form data tracking is included, but it is important to note that this data is only visible if the user submits the form.
- While it’s interesting to track individual users, you quickly realize that watching the individual user sessions has limited practicality and takes a lot of time. Even if you speed up the video, it’s difficult to gain significant insight without watching a lot of videos. However, you can tag visitors via Javascript while on the site. You can create tags such as “Checkout_Failed” or “Clicked_Customer_Support” in order to focus on specific visitor segments.
- The page I most wanted to test was an AJAX-heavy one page checkout page. Unfortunately, ClickTale has a limited ability to handle the AJAX. It actually supported it better than I expected, but definitely not well enough to really prove useful.
- In my opinion, the usability and design of the reporting backend was very poor and hard to use (developer documentation on the support form was excellent though).
Pricing starts at $99/mo for the paid version. There is a free account which is useful to get an overview of the system but extremely limited in functionality.
I’d love to hear what you think of ClickTale, both from an outside perspective looking in and especially if you’ve used it before. Is this taking user tracking too far or is it the best thing since sliced bread?
