What is the user doing on my site?
10 Dec 2007 TheMarker (www.themarker.com 
) and Haaretz Newspaper print edition
English translation
A question that interests every website owner is - how do the users react to my content? What works?; why do they decide to add certain products to their shopping carts?; why do they read certain content?; and are there sections of the site that simply don’t appeal to them? To cope with these questions, website owners rely on two forms of analysis: statistical analytics and usability analytics. There are several products on the market that provide statistical analytics relating to web user behavior..
First and foremost there is Google Analytics, as well as Mint and Performancing Metrics. The Israeli startup (ClickTale ) adds another layer to existing analytics: it enables the site owners to watch movie clips that document the user’s surfing behavior. Every move or mouse click and every keyboard keystroke is recorded. In fact, the clips record the user’s mouse movement that runs across the screen; the processed recording is transferred to the ClickTale servers and arrives to the website owners with analysis of the clips – what each user actually did on their site.
Over the weekend ClickTale completed a Series A financing round from the venture capital fund YL Ventures, which invests in European and Israeli startups, and is managed by Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf (Jonathan Leitersdorf’s cousin). The company declined to specify the investment amount. The American website VentureBeat reported that the investment amount was $3 million, but Dr. Tal Schwartz, the entrepreneur behind ClickTale, refuses to confirm that number.
In addition to clips that document the users, ClickTale offers two additional services: the first is HeatMaps – a service that allows visual representation of the sections of the site that had the highest number of clicks; the second is Link Analysis – a service that provides an answer to the question: how many people used the links (how long was their mouse cursor on the link and who clicked it).
Eventually, both services also provide an answer as to how many of the users accessed all the sections of the site, and surfed fully from beginning to end (how many of them scrolled). This is data that cannot be extracted from “standard” web analytics. The ability to watch user behavior using movie clips is not exclusive to ClickTale. Companies such as RobotReplay and TapeFailure offer a similar service, but still Schwartz believes that his company has a solution that his competitors don’t: “we collect ten times the data of any other form of web user analytics system”.
ClickTale offers its analytics services at a fee of $19.99 per month. “The difference is in the number of recordings that you get”, Schwartz explains. We began by selling basic services and now we are expanding them. We expect that every e-commerce site will use web analytics technology. Everyone wants to track users and understand them”.
ClickTale is a hosted service, and therefore software installation is not required either at the server or at the user. Site operators only need to add a small amount of JavaScript code to their Web pages.
The JavaScript collects the surfing data and transmits that to ClickTale’s servers for processing. Thereafter, ClickTale produces movie clips of surfing sessions in real time, and site operators can securely connect at any time in order to watch the clips.
Still, two problems concern such services. The first is user privacy. The fact that the most sensitive user data are transferred by site owners to a third party may bother certain users, and therefore site owners may withdraw.
And dealing with websites that make use of Ajax is no simple task. ClickTale’s technology requires small adaptations to Ajax-based sites. At a time when not a few Web 2.0 sites make use of this technology, the complication that is involved in adaptations represents some other barrier.
