Ever wonder how to make your site or blog perform better? What do you change so it can help you reach the results you expect?
Sure, you can ask some friends for their opinion but, what if you could experience how a real person behaves, what they do or where they click.
Think of retail stores or supermarkets and how they position every single product on their floor according to a strategy based on extensive customer behavior studies. Things are not just placed there to see what happens.
This is the second installment of the “Social Power Tools To Kick It Up A Notch” series. This time we’ll talk about a service that will let you watch how people behave when they visit your site or blog. Yes, I said “watch”. This application is called ClickTale and I will tell you how to benefit from it.
But let’s start from the beginning…
What Are The Objectives?
- The first thing we need is clarity about our objectives. What do we want our website/blog to do? You might be trying to increase your mailing list or generate more traffic, maybe convert visitors to potential clients.
- Once that is clear, look at how are you doing in those areas. Are people signing up for your newsletter or visiting your “Services” page after reading your latest post?
- Before we start moving things around or making our “Subscribe” button twice as big with a flashing effect, let’s take the time to observe.
And that’s where a tool like ClickTale comes in. Now we can move on to the main features and how you can leverage from them…
Record Your Visitors
ClickTale records whatever is happening on the screen when a visitor comes in your site. You can actually experience how the visitor scrolls down the page and observe the behavior through the mouse. See if your visitor hovers any sections or is actually clicking on them or if he/she scrolls down all the way or bounces before finishing your post.
You can also set the video viewing speed, it’s pretty easy to tell if the person is actually reading the post or just scanning it.
Heatmaps
Watching how a real user behaves in your site is truly an eye-opener but we need the big picture in order to make a significant change. Heatmaps are a great visualization tool for that. You can run heatmaps based on a specific URL within your site by a date range to see what are the areas where that group of visitors are hovering, clicking or whether they are scrolling down or not on separate maps. The next image shows you where visitors are mostly going over with their mouse.
Next is the Scroll heatmap. You can see how the temperature goes down as you scroll and what’s the hottest piece of real estate on the page. I’m not showing the entire image here.
Tip: Take a picture of the entire heatmap and download it. If you use Firefox this is as easy as installing the Screengrab! plugin, it takes a screenshot of the entire page even below the fold.
Reports
ClickTale also provides a series of valuable reports displaying data you can analyze if you’re trying to step up your game. These reports tell you what are the most engaging pages, the most clicked, the least scrolled and even the slowest loading, which is by the way one of the main reasons a visitor will surf away from your site.
So Now You Know What’s Up… What’s Next?
After paying attention to some videos and heatmaps you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. Now you know if people are just not seeing your Subscribe button, perhaps because it’s on the opposite side from where all the action is happening. You will be able to better position the different elements.
ClickTale has different pricing packages depending on your needs and it also has a free basic package.
What I learned…
I learned a couple of things after just watching a few videos, one is that people were looking for the top navigation bar and my blog only had the one on the sidebar. The other one is that I get better scrolls when the post has images.
If you find yourself screaming at the screen “don’t go yet! look at the pretty navigation on the right! tweet it dude, tweet it!”, maybe you should take a break.
See what you find out. Be curious and question everything. Don’t be afraid to make changes, it’s the only way to improve. Make your site do what it is supposed to do.
And visit the first post of the series: Social Power Tools To Kick It Up A Notch (Tool #1): ObjectiveMarketer
Photo Credit: Jerry Cook
