Every SEOs Dream, the ability to watch, pause and record actual user sessions

Yep, that’s right. Something right out of the Jetsons. Ok, so maybe not something Cogswell could have dreamed up, but if you’re an web analytics junkie like me, you’re going to love this tool from Clicktale for tracking user behavior on your web site.

There are plenty of great tools out there for analytics: Google Analytics, StatCounter, etc. If you’re not tracking your stats for your site(s) today, then you definitely need to be looking at your web analytics.

If you’re new to analytics and aren’t even sure what’s important or where to start, then take a read of Peyman’s article Hits, Visits, Page Views – What’s Important?. That will give you a good intro as to what some basic analytics terms mean and what you should be looking at for tracking your site’s activity.

Today however, I wanted to introduce you to something that takes analytics to another level. Let’s face it, whenever we make a site change, the first thing we want to know is how our site visitors will interact with the new site design. Maybe it’s just an image tweak or new placement, or possibly a completely new home page design you’re about to launch.

The guys over at Clicktale have done an outstanding job of giving webmasters the ability to actually watch user sessions – yep, that’s right – by adding a couple pieces of javascript code to your site in the header and footer, you’ll be able to sample a % of your visitors (or 100%) of them into the Clicktale system. After doing this, it will give you the ability to watch exactly what your visitors are doing once they come to your site. Are they clicking something you have on the page that isn’t linked? Are they scrolling down to the footer only to find no content? This tool will show you what your users are doing on your site(s). Once you sign up for your free (or paid) account, you’ll be well on your way to knowing what your visitors are doing once they get to your site.

After being in this business for well over 10 years now, I’ll say this is by far one of the coolest pieces of tracking software I’ve seen to date. It literally made me say “WOW!, That’s amazing.”

Here’s an example of how the Clicktale investment paid off for us in the first 10 minutes of being used.

We all should be monitoring our sites from the server side for script errors (HTTP 500, 404′s etc.), either by looking at the raw log files from your server or by creating email handlers that intercept these errors and notify you when something’s broken on your site (if you’re not doing this already, or don’t know what the above sentence means, then stay tuned, I’ll be writing a piece on this in the weeks to come).

The one area that’s always been of frustration to me is Javascript errors. You can just ask Shane from our days back at Headhunter.net. They (js errors) can be so frustrating as an engineer because you can’t physically see them happen like you can with server side errors. Since javascript errors occur client side, how would you ever know if one happened unless you discover it testing yourself or using an automated testing tool like selenium.

That being said, we turned on Clicktale for sell my house fast, a new site we launched as part of a national TV campaign we started in January of this year that’s running nationwide on the Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox Cable footprints in major US markets. We wanted to make sure that we were not only monitoring server side errors, but also making sure our users were able to understand and use the site so we could ultimately help them in their time of need.

After turning on Clicktale for all of about 10 minutes, we already had several user sessions recorded and started the playback inside the control panel. What we found was amazing. Not only can you see every mouse click, scroll, and user filling out of a form on the site, you can also see any client side scripting errors. Beautiful! This investment had paid for itself in just 10 minutes.

Not only does Clicktale give you top notch user session play back they also give some incredible heat map tools as well as overlays. It’s probably only a matter of time before some of their features are incorporated into Google Analytics and other analytics software I would imagine.

We’d love to hear what your favorite analytics packages are and what tools you are using to monitor your site(s), etc. Do you have experience with Clicktale? What are you thoughts?

Cheers, Matthew