Website analytics is an important tool for any small business or ecommerce business. Popular analytics packages, such as Google Analytics for example, offer site owners a detailed look at how people find your website and how they transition between pages on your site.ClickTale, a provider of Customer Experience Analytics (CEA), is one company that offers a way for businesses to see more than just page transitions -- it provides a way to see in-depth analytics for every page and every customer interaction and experience that takes place within a website. "There are many analytics companies out there, such as Google Analytics and Omniture, and they work by looking at the transitioning between different pages," said Shmuli Goldberg, ClickTale director of marketing and communications."So, they see how many people went to a landing page; like a home page for example, and then see how many people went from that page to another page. They give you very valuable information but what they don't focus on is what happens within a page itself; to see where someone looks within a page or clicks within a page and what parts of a page a customer actually interacts with," he added.How ClickTale Customer Experience Analytics WorksAs a website visitor moves his or her mouse over a page, clicks on an image or scrolls down your page, ClickTale captures that information. With this detailed data you can then see how customers react to your page, what images and links they click and what page elements they interact with while browsing.On the analytics end of ClickTale, site owners can search for specific customers (e.g. customers who clicked a specific call to action link but then did not complete a form submission) and then view the details and video of the customer's actual browsing session on the page. Using ClickTale you can learn important information about your customers' browsing behavior. You can see where customers came from, what pages they visited within your site, the links each clicked on, how far down each page they scrolled and if they successfully submitted a form or completed any call-to-action on your site. ClickTale also lets you view browsing sessions from customers who did not complete an action. For example, you can view sessions from customers who hovered over a submit button but did not click on it.New Heatmap Features and Form AnalyticsEarlier this month ClickTale introduced two new behavioral heatmap features to give site owners even more details about website visitors and their browsing behavior. Heatmaps are designed to show site owners which parts of a page get the most attention from website visitors. The product offers heatmaps to show you which parts of the page are read or skipped over, mouse movement and clicks, and how far down your page a visitor scrolls and where they abandon.The recently added Segmented Heatmaps feature lets site owners filter ClickTale's visual heatmaps based on any customer information or browsing behavior. With this new feature you can quickly view data from as many as 100,000 visitors in a single graphical report, to compare and contrast how different user groups engage with the webpage.Another noteworthy feature of ClickTale is the Form Analytics. This can be used to find out where and why customers abandon forms on your website. You can search for any metric to see how customers use your form to increase performance."Form Analytics provides important information that can help increase your online forms' conversion rates," said Goldberg. "You can watch the videos of customers who tried but did not successfully submit a form to see if they had a problem; like a JavaScript error or they forgot to tick a certain a box, and so on," he explained.Once you can see where customers experience problems when filling out a form, you can then change or redesign the form for better usability, knowing if customers experience a navigation problem or if abandonment is due to a consistent user error. The Form Analytics also provides site owners with a daily conversion rate snapshot showing how many visitors came to your form, interacted with the form, tried but failed to submit it, and how many customers successfully completed the form.ClickTale Pricing and AvailabilityClickTale analytics is a hosted solution that is integrated in to any website by adding JavaScript tracking code to the web pages you would like to record. ClickTale allows each subscriber to select the percentage of their visitors they would like to record, however you can only record up to your monthly recording limit as determined by your ClickTale subscription plan. The Gold Plan is designed for ecommerce websites with up to 300,000 recorded monthly pageviews and is priced at $990 monthly. The Silver Plan offers 80,000 recorded pageviews per month at $290. There are also plans available for smaller websites and a free plan with 400 pageviews per month and limited playback capabilities. Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.
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