Product review – ClickTracks
Posted in News on: Wednesday, June 30, 2004 by Paul Boag
Do you have trouble understanding the statistics on your website’s traffic? If so then ClickTracks could be for you.
The problem with website statistic packages
I don’t know about you but I am a visual person. If I am trying to understand a new concept I grasp it quicker if I can actually see it in action or at least see a diagram of how it works. Perhaps that is why I used to find website statistics so hard to get my head around. I found it hard to get any real value from all of those columns of statistics. Sure they are great if all you want to know is how many people viewed your site yesterday or what percentage of people use internet explorer. However I always found it hard to get a feel of how my visitors were moving around the site and where they were encountering problems.
A different approach
Clicktracks takes a different approach and one that is superb if you want to really understand how users interact with your site. Sure it provides all of the normal statistical reporting allowing you to bring back information such as; most common entry page, most common exit page, number of visitors per day etc. It even allows you to generate reports that focus on specific user groups such as pay-per-click customers or those that stayed at the site over 30 seconds. However what really sets Clicktracks apart is the ability to overlay powerful statistical reporting on top of your website. In other words you can actually browse your website and see who clicked on what and when. It is even possible to follow individual users through the site and see exactly what pages they hit and in what order. Still confused? Then take a few moment to watch the demonstration available from their homepage . It really helps to explain the potential of this application. Visit the ClickTracks website now
The Benefits
The benefits of this approach our obvious. It allows you to gather huge amounts of usability information without running usability test sessions. Although weblogs are never going to replace test sessions Clicktracks does give detailed information about visitors surfing habits. ClickTracks gives you the ability to really get under the skin of your users. For example it is possible to isolate the users that have completed your call to action (whether that is buying a product or completing a contact us form) and analysis how they came to that point. How did they enter the site? What pages did they view? How long did it take them between arriving and completing the call to action? It also allows you to do the reverse with users that fail to complete your call to action. Why did a user abandon their shopping cart? ClickTracks would allow you to discover for example that many people abandoned their carts after visiting the delivery information page. That might tell you that your postage is too expensive or it takes too long to deliver. You can also track users that arrived after searching for a specific keyword. How long did it take them to find the page on your site that specifically relates to that keyword? Did they go to other pages that were not relevant first? I am sure you get the idea.
Conclusions
Although this kind of tracking is available through most statistics packages Clicktracks makes it available in a much more intuitive fashion without loosing any of the flexibility or power of more traditional software. Combine this with the lightning processing of even large sets of weblogs and you really do have a winning package. To see for yourself just how powerful Clicktracks can be click here and download a demonstration version.
