Setting the Bar: Google
Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is arguably one of
the best website analytics tools on the market. For starters, it’s completely
free and there are lots of training tools (also free!) available for even the
least experienced marketers to learn the ins and outs of the system. Avinash
Kaushik explains that GA is one of the only free, robust analytics tools
available that also has “custom reporting and advanced segmentation built in,”
and that companies really don’t need to pay for more advanced systems unless
their needs are particularly complex (2010, p. 29). Furthermore, the tool
generates enough useful data that other tools may not be necessary if users are
looking for simple reports about traffic, user demographics, conversions and
referrals. E-Nor.com, a California-based digital analytics and marketing
optimization consulting firm recently analyzed the web analytics tool usage
among Fortune 500 companies. As of 2013, more than 63% of these companies are
using GA as their analytics tools (Farina, 2013).
So if GA can do so much for so many, what
else could a company possibly need? What other tools offer alternatives or
supplements to GA’s capabilities? While there are dozens and dozens (if not
hundreds!) of analytics tools available, one that stands out is Clicktale, a
tool devoted to analyzing the customer experience. While GA can tell a marketer
where a customer came from, if they were a repeat visitor, if they made a
purchase, and what their demographic profile might be, it cannot tell the
marketer exactly what someone’s experience
was with the website. GA does a great job of tracking the origination and
termination of a user’s experience, but it cannot offer much dynamic insight
into how the user experienced the site between arriving and leaving. Beyond the
amount of time spent on the site and a general click stream, GA doesn’t paint
much of a user experience picture. Here’s where a tool like ClickTale can
supplement the GA data.
ClickTale: The User
Experience Analyst
In a nutshell, ClickTale “enables
businesses to maximize revenues by optimizing the way people experience the
digital world” (ClickTale, 2014a). The basic products that ClickTale offers
provide video session playbacks for individual customers, several types of heat
maps to show customers view, scroll and click, and conversion funnels to show
exactly what makes successful transactions happen. Digging a little deeper into
these features will help explain why ClickTale is a great addition to any
marketer’s web analytics toolbox.
Session Playback
This feature of ClickTale’s offerings
allows marketers to watch recordings of a visitor’s entire session on a
particular site. The tool explains, “see your site through the eyes of your
visitors. Understand how they use your site, what they’re trying to achieve and
where they encounter errors” (ClickTale, 2014e). A benefit of this tool is that
it allows marketers to view complete sessions of people who bounced from the
site, didn’t follow through with a purchase or decided to leave during a set
process like filling out a form. Seeing exactly where a customer got
frustrated, and identifying trends, can help marketers make the user experience
better. Problem areas are easily, visually identified using this tool. GA does
not have this sort of functionality; it would only report that a user bounced
initially, did not convert, or didn’t spend a long time on a particular page.
Heat Maps
ClickTale offers several types of heat map
data including mouse move heat maps, click heat maps, attention heat maps and
scroll-reach heat maps. This comprehensive toolkit of heat maps, “lets you
optimize your websites conversion rates and usability by visualizing your
visitors’ every mouse move, click and scroll. Heat maps are aggregated reports
that visually display what parts of a webpage are looked at, clicked on,
focused on and interacted with by thousands of online visitors” (ClickTale,2014b). Knowing exactly where on a website users are spending time or clicking
is incredibly valuable for a marketer. This allows for the adjustment and
re-formatting of potential problem areas, and also allows marketers to see what
is working well. GA does not have this sort of functionality; it does not
report exactly where on a page users are spending time. GA would simply be able
to show where a user clicked if there were links to click. It would not be able
to show what buttons, content, images or forms a user spent a lot of time
looking at.
Conversion Tools
ClickTale’s conversion tools are meant to
help marketers understand why website visitors succeed or fail to complete each
step of a particular conversion goal (ClickTale, 2014d). The conversion funnel
functionality pinpoints exactly where potential customers are leaving the
conversion process. This tool, combined with the video playback, gives
marketers a unique set of quantitative and qualitative data for each step of
the conversion process (ClickTale, 2014d). Addiontally, ClickTale offers a form
analytics tool, which helps marketers see what parts of a form might be too
lengthy, confusing or frustrating. Finally, link analytics give marketers the
ability to see how quickly a user clicks a button or link, if he or she is
hovering or hesitating, and which links are being ignored or missed entirely. GA
is much more limited when it comes to conversions. The tool only reveals the
number of conversions, and how they originated, but the experience of the user
to get to that point is not revealed.
Conclusion
While the data the GA provides is
incredibly valuable (and free!), it does not necessarily give marketers the
whole picture of what it’s like for a visitor to actually experience a website.
Beginning and ending data like how a visitor was referred and if he or she
converted is certainly important to know, but without really understanding how
a customer got from point A to point C, marketers can’t really analyze the user
experience. As ClickTale explains, “Most web analytics solutions capture
visitors landing on a web page and monitor their movement from page to page
within a site. This is great for collecting quantitative information about your
website traffic, but can’t tell you much about what visitors do once inside
these pages” (ClickTale, 2014c). Using a tool like ClickTale in addition to GA
can give a marketer a more robust picture of how visitors are experiencing
their websites and processes. Analyzing all of this quantitative AND
qualitative data can help guide decision-making processes about layout, design,
and functionality that will ultimately help the user and increase
profitability.
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