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ClickTracks 3.3
You've developed an incredible website…the graphics, content and interactivity are compelling…and now you want to assess how well it’s doing the job. Just how are visitors reacting to each of your gorgeous pages? How are they using your carefully thought-out navigation to get the full message of the site? Your site's log files contain a wealth of information—everything from IP addresses to top level domain referrals to cookie values. But if you’ve worked with log analysis programs in the past, you know they are good at creating great piles of bar graphs and pie charts but not very good at helping you evaluate your design.
ClickTracks is a log analyzer, but it takes a different approach. ClickTracks shows results that are directly relevant to the needs of people doing the analysis, rather than simply building every imaginable chart from the log data and leaving you to figure out what it means.
Visual Analysis
Perhaps the most striking feature of ClickTracks is its visual navigation analysis. Instead of giving you charts of data, Clicktracks shows on your site itself the percentage of visitors to each page who take each link, the percentage of visitors who see the page, and the percentage of visitors who exit at the page.
Because my clients regard their log analysis as confidential, I asked ClickTracks to make their own Web site log available so that their product could be used on their own site as a demonstration, and they graciously agreed. So our example is the use of ClickTracks to analyze the Clicktracks Web site itself. The site has a box of links, shown here as Figure 1. This box shows the different visitor types, and takes you to reasons why each of these visitor types is well served by ClickTracks. There’s plenty of space around the text, and it’s simple and clear.
Figure 1.Why ClickTracks?
Now let’s see how this well thought out navigation is actually being used! When we run an analysis, ClickTracks shows the percentage of visitors who take a link right below the link itself.
Figure 2. Why ClickTracks? Analyzed
Figure 2 shows the result of a ClickTracks analysis of the site, using its Web site log. Notice that 4.8% of visitors are taking the link from the box’s heading, and 2.1% are choosing the link for “See Web-use patterns instantly.” Less than 1% of visitors are choosing any of the bottom four links! This suggests that perhaps the most effective message of this box is “See Web-use patterns instantly”, and rest of the box could be discarded. Such a change would present a simpler screen and fewer choices to the home page visitor.
Page Analysis
ClickTracks also produces a Page Analysis with overall statistics for the page being analyzed, alongside the visual link analysis. Figure 3 shows ClickTracks’ page analysis for the home page.
Figure 3. Page Analysis
We see from this analysis that most visitors see the home page, no doubt because that’s the most common entry point to the site. They spend an average of 49 seconds on the home page, a high value suggesting that many visitors find the home page interesting. The number of exits is high, too, though, suggesting that a fair number of visitors are irrelevant, possibly the result of search engine promotion that is bringing traffic but not highly relevant traffic.
Site Map
The Site Map view is the third analytical result that’s available for each page. Here is part of it that deals with the source of traffic for this page, in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Site Map
This analysis shows us that more home page visitors come from Google than any other source, a common occurrence, since Google is generally regarded to get about 30% of searches. The clickz.com site referrals are likely related to the ClickZ Award as the Best Web Site Analytics Tool. Statslab and analog are related to Dr. Stephen Turner, author of open source analysis tools as well as being the CTO of ClickTracks.
Search Report
The Search Report shows which search engines, for which keywords, are delivering visitors to the site. Part of the Search Report is shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Search Report
This report is color-coded, so that the most important keywords are surrounded by darker colors, and the less important keywords are surrounded by lighter color. We see here that most visitors from search engines are looking for the name of the company itself; which suggests that the search engine campaign’s strength has not been bringing visitors who don’t already know about the company. If “web statistics” or “log analyzer” were the top terms, that would point to a more effective search engine promotion.
Visitor Tagging
An innovative ClickTracks feature is visitor tagging, where you can associate a tag with a type of visitor based on the query term they used, the search engine they come from, and so on. In this example, the tag has been assigned to visitors who spend longer than 40 seconds on the site. Clearly, visitors who spend longer than 40 seconds are the more interested visitors. So let’s examine the same navigation box shown in Figures 1 and 2, where we thought that perhaps this box should be removed from the site. The new analysis, for just these tagged visitors, is shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Navigation Analysis for Interested Visitors
This analysis, done for the visitors who are most interested and likely to become customers, shows that they behave rather differently from the average of all visitors! In fact, they navigate all the links of this box to some extent, except for the link that talks about easy installation. So if the design of the site is really to serve these most interested visitors, then perhaps the earlier conclusion, based on an average of all visitors, is not correct.
ClickTracks’ ability to tag groups of visitors is important, because it can reveal how the very visitors the site wants to reach behave on the site—and they are the ones of interest, not the average of all visitors. If a site has a “purchase” page, then visitors who reach that page can be tagged, and their behavior can be studied, to best suit the site to these most important visitors.
Summary
As a specialist in Web marketing and search engine promotion, I have far too much experience with earlier log analysis programs. They are slow, they produce hundreds of graphs that are hard for me to understand and impossible for my clients to understand. ClickTracks, with its visual analysis of navigation, presented in a way that everyone can understand at once, not only helps me understand but it helps me present my analytical results to my clients in ways that they can understand. In that sense, ClickTracks is clearly a breakthrough product.
There is one major limitation of ClickTracks—it doesn’t do graphs of various properties over time. For example, if you want to see the relative importance of some particular search engine in bringing visitors over time, ClickTracks won’t give you a bar graph of the number of visitors per month or week or day for some period in the past. If this is important to you, don’t throw away your conventional log analyzer when you acquire ClickTracks.
The pricing of ClickTracks, at a simple $495, is a welcome change compared to the pricing of earlier log analyzers, that sharply increase in price as you expand the scope of their use.
Price: $495
More information at: http://www.clicktracks.com
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| Review by: Dave Roberts, President of davedoesitall.com corporation. Duplication of this article in whole or in part is strictly prohibited. |
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