For awhile I have been lamenting the overall lack of progress in web analytics. I’ve been in the industry for 10 years now, and although the methodology behind collecting data has improved, the graphs have got a bit prettier, and the integration with online marketing tools such as Google AdWords has greatly improved, overall, it has been pretty slow progress in my opinion.

Recently James recommended Clicky which is a fairly lightweight but very web 2.0 style analytics application. The two features I like the most is the Spy report which lets you see in real time who is on your site including a mash-up with Google Maps to show where they are located, and the ability to get the data via RSS feeds.

One of the most interesting reports you get from Google Analytics and some other tools is what’s referred to as the “heat map”. This is a report that overlays where on the page of your site people click most frequently. This is particularly interesting in trying to understand which calls to action or elements on a page are the most successful. This can be invaluable in determining what changes you might make to key parts of the site, such as the home page, to try to improve conversion rates.

This brings me on to ClickTale, which I am quite excited about, as I think it is the substantial leap in analytics that I have been waiting for.

ClickTale

Their tag line sums it up really:

Record - Watch - Understand

This service allows you to record every mouse click and scrolling up and down the page (this is really significant) as the user navigates through the site and plays it back to you as a movie. So you can see exactly how a visitor to your site interacts from the moment they arrive until they leave again.

Analytics, including the heat maps and path reports, are all about aggregated data, and therein lies the problem. You have to make decisions based on numbers, the majority. ClickTale allows you to study how individuals interact with your website, online store or web application at a very deep and quite personal level. This type of insight has traditionally only been available via usability studies and testing and also visitor surveys.

I have taken a quick screenshot video to show you how it looks:

This is probably not a great demo but imagine the possibilities:

• Detailed analysis of an e-commerce store to understand how people browse/search for products and go through the checkout process.
• An alternative to a usability study in a new web application - just deploy ClickTale and release to beta users and see what they are doing.
• Real time analysis of your campaign landing pages to understand how the calls to action are working and allow you to make changes to the design.

There are likely to be some privacy concerns around this, but it is really just a logical extension of web analytics. Existing packages would more or less have this data, but never before have I seen it presented in this way.

Overall, I am very excited with this product and can see numerous opportunities to start using it right now. I hope this will push the major analytics providers to start to think more creatively about how they can provide more insightful information rather than just giving me a prettier graph for essentially the same report as I have been looking at for over 10 years.