You’ve spent lots of money and countless hours perfecting your web presence. You’re certain that you’ll be immediately deluged with qualified leads. But when you flip the switch and it goes live, it’s not quite working how you expected it. This happens more often than not, and can be discouraging. While there are best practices that you can follow, online marketing and lead generation isn’t quite an exact science. Of course you can use Google’s Web Master Tools to conduct A/B testing on your content, but how can you know what parts of a page are working and what parts are not? Now you can find out by using specialized analytics software that records, monitors, and analyzes how your visitors interact with your website. Continue reading and I’ll tell you about two different tools that you can use to find out EXACTLY how users interact with your site and landing pages.
Clicktale – 4 levels of users starting at Free and going up to $790/month.
Clicktale is a very full featured web analytics package that gets into some of the granular details that are left out of Google Analytics. Some of the key things that Clicktale can help you do is optimize landing pages, optimize shopping cart experiences, conduct usability tests, with the overall goal of maximizing your conversions. Using javascript code that you place on your page, you can get a variety of reports back like form conversion statistics, blank field reports, user click heatmaps, and link analytics. One key differentiator of Clicktale is that you can actually record user’s interaction with your website. By looking at these recordings, you can actually see HOW your visitors are using your site. It totally eliminates any guesswork that might be involved. A very well known software company, 37 Signals, utilized Clicktale to help them redesign their signup conversion pages. You can see what 37 Signals had to say about their results here: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1867-design-decisions-new-signup-form
CrazyEgg – 4 levels of users starting at $9/month and going up to $99/month.
Crazy Egg offers some of the functionality that Clicktale offers, but not quite the whole package. Where CrazyEgg shines is in the user click heatmap, where you can visually see how visitors are interacting with forms. A key difference in CrazyEgg’s software is what they call “Confetti” mode. When you’re in this mode of heatmap, you can track clicks by referral URL. This allows you to see the different ways visitors from an AdWords campaign interact with your site, as opposed to people who came in from Twitter. Another advantage of CrazyEgg is their simplified price structure. Rather than taking away options to offer a Basic service for $9/month, they offer you the full package. The only restriction is the number of pages that you can have your testing on at any one time.
The Verdict: This niche of web analytics is definitely under-served by Google Analytics (their overlay functionality is horrible), and both of these solutions pick up where Google left off. If money is no object, Clicktale is by far the superior product. Their user experience recordings literally remove all of the guesswork from the process. But as you get away from the premium versions, important features start to disappear. If you have a limited budget or a small website, CrazyEgg is for you. I personally have used CrazyEgg with success in the past, and can vouch for its usefulness. Either way you can’t go wrong, because the more knowledge you have about your users the more powerful your site can be for lead generation.
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