Stalk your users: Clicktale, Userfly, and Mouseflow review (2010)

A new form of web analytics has appeared! Its one that records every keystroke, mouse movement, and click of your actual users for easy playback. That’s right! You can now sit back and literally watch every action your users make on your website.

As the concept sounded interesting, I took ClickTale, userfly, and Mouseflow.com= for a spin. I wanted find out if there’s actual value in going through thousands of recorded user-sessions and the statistics that can be pulled from it. Read on and find out!

The core feature of each service is to record and playback the interactions of your website’s users – a feature that is incredibly useful. It helps bury preconceived ideas of how you think your users interact with your site. Guessing is dead. Now you can actually know! Say bye to long and tiresome debates!

Traditional web analytics suites like Google Analytics are priceless, but their statistics leaves you guessing. You have to make qualified guesses to why certain parts of your website is less visited than others. You have to make guesses as to where the user looks and which button he clicks. You have to make changes in the blind.

User recordings moves you from guessing to knowing! To be quite honest, I am stunned how web analytics professionals can call themselves professionals without also digging in to user recordings.

Recording your users is like conducting thousands of user tests. Face-to-face user tests are invaluable, but their main problem is that they are qualitative. You are not entirely certain that what three users did is the same as all of your users would would do. Face-to-face user tests are incredibly valuable, but can be artificial and too task oriented. User recordings lets you watch users who are just visiting for the experience, inspiration, or mere waste of time. You will never get to observe such behavior in a face-to-face moderated user test. I am sold!

The three services

Userfly.com

Out of the three user recording services, userfly.com is the most basic. Its only feature is recording user sessions and playing them back. You can sort and filter your recordings by a number of variables, but that is it.

There is no dashboard, and statistics that sums everything up. Userfly however does its job well.

Mouseflow.com

Mouseflow.com ups the ante from Userfly.com. At a ridiculously low cost per month, you get a smoother user recording and playback suite, as well as page analysis, click heatmaps and viewport heatmaps.

The page analysis crosses the border of Google Analytics, and will tell you things like bounce rate and average visit length. However, what traditional web analytics can’t tell you are “average interaction time”, loading time, and clicks per view. I particularly find the combination of “average visit length” and “average interaction time” interesting: are you users actually doing anything while visiting your site?

The click heatmap will give you a glimpse of what links attract attention, and perhaps just as interesting: what non-interactive parts of a page do your users believe they can interact with.

Finally, the viewport heatmap (scroll reach) will tell you if your users actually make it to the bottom of a page. Do only 10% of your users read your blog posts in their entirety?

Don’t let the simple look of mouseflow.com= fool you. It’s a powerful web analytics suite that gives you plenty of statistics and features to play around with. Mouseflow had what I needed and not all that nice-to-have stuff.

Did I mention it’s a steal at its current price? At first I didn’t see it, but they charge you for recordings and not pageviews. A website with moderate user interaction have around 5-10 pageviews per recording.

UPDATE: Since this review, mouseflow.com added livestreaming (watch your users live!) and movement heat maps.

ClickTale

ClickTale is by far the most advanced service of the three! They have been in business since 2006, which clearly shows. Things just work!

Besides user recordings, Clicktale takes this form of web analytics to a whole other level that can best be described as a full-fledged mature web analytics suite.

ClickTale adds two more interesting heatmaps to tha ball: “mouse move” and attention heatmaps. The mouse-move heatmap acknowledges a phenomenon I observed many times while watching recorded user sessions: people tend to use the mouse pointer to guide their eyes! ClickTale claims that there is an 84% to 88% correlation between mouse and eye movements. Budget eye tracking anyone?

All heatmaps can be filtered real-time by transparency, coverage, temperature. I was amazed – you really need to check out this for yourself.

Most web analytics professionals are incredibly concerned with increasing conversion rates. A crucial form can either make or brakes an account creation, lead sign up, or purchase. This is why I was ecstatic to find out how powerful ClickTale’s form analytics tool was. It broke down the conversion funnel into interactions, and even told me what fields of a form was left untouched, and what field took the longest to fill out.

ClickTale is packed with report tools, statistics tools, and lots of powerful features that I never got to explore. It’s huge! And that’s my main concern with ClickTale: you almost need to be educated to take full advantage of the suite. Although I enthusiastically explored the abundance of cool ClickTale features, I kept falling back to just watching user recordings.

Everything below 10.000 recordings is useless

10.000-20.000 user recordings seemed to be the limit for getting useful recordings with good long interactions that you can learn from. It also seemed to be the limit for the heatmaps and especially the form analytics of ClickTale to render userful.

Pricing

In the calculations below, I’ve assumed an average of 4 pageviews per recording and that 1 Euro is worth 1.4 dollars.

Userfly

Mouseflow

Clicktale

The verdict

User recordings is what it comes down to: it is what by far gives me the most value. User recordings replicate my all-time favorite google analytics companion: real-life face-to-face user testing. Each service does this well.

Watching thousands of user sessions is time consuming. Behavior repeats and watching it gets boring after a while. This is why you need statistics and analytics. Here, ClickTale is the undisputed winner. Its analysis capabilities never ceased to amaze me!

I however keep thinking that I could do with mouseflow.com for the needs and budget I have right now. When I get familiar with the functionality, I might want more – and that’s when I’ll turn to ClickTale.

The verdict is a tie between ClickTale and mouseflow.com. While ClickTale can do way more and works better than mouseflow, mouseflow is cheap and will fulfill all your needs for a good while.