Have you ever wanted to see how your website users are consuming and interacting with your content? Have you ever wanted to understand why a landing page is not converting? Have you ever wanted to check the usability of a page or of your whole website?
If (obviously) one of the answers to the previous questions is YES then ClickTale and UserFly are two tools that you should absolutely consider. This two tools by no mean can replace a proper usability study with guided tours and users interviews, but can for sure help you to iron out most of the day to day usability problems you might have.
Both ClickTale and UserFly offer a palette of different price plans, including basic free plans. The free plans while limited compared to the paying plans are perfectly suitable for small web sites. In other words you have no excuses not to try these two excellent products.
What are ClickTale and UserFly?
In their basic form both products enables the site administrator to have a video playback of the user session on the site. Both work with a SaaS (Software as a Service) model, exactly like many other Web Analytics tools. Like with Google Analytics, Sitecatalyst and many other tools you will have to place snippets of JavaScript code in the pages you want to test.
While UserFly is specialised in showing you recorded sessions, ClickTale offers a number of additional features like heat maps, both for clicks and for mouse movement (in general mouse movement is a proxy for where the attention of the visitor is) and other reports that you could get out any web analytics package, like demographics, most engaging pages and so on. The fact that this reporting is integrated in the service is nevertheless very good.
ClickTale
Without going in detail (you can register for a free plan if you want to try). Clicktale looks like the most polished product out of the two. What is really impressive is that it enables you to aggregate the behaviour of all visitors through heat maps. The mouse move and mouse click heat maps are brilliant for getting insights about your site. You can also setup alerts (like when a customer drops out on a purchase process) on particular events, but more important you can setup filters that enable to classify and sort the massive amount of data that you might collect. For example you might want to study why people are abandoning your conversion funnel and focus your study only on the critical recordings (or aggregate them in a heat map).
The plans are somehow quite expensive and probably out of reach of small non-profit websites and as you can see plans ranges from 99US$/month to 790US$/month. The free plan offers limited but nevertheless useful features. For example the recordings are limited to only the first two pages and the heat maps are limited only to the most popular pages.
UserFly
Userfly offers the recording and playback capabilities only but for a much more affordable fee ranging from 10US$/month to 200US$/month. The free plan is limited to 10 captures a month, but unlike ClickTale, you can view the complete sessions. The playback is very smooth and very accurate.
Limitations
Both products have limitations, in particular with AJAX and pages with complex Javascript functionalities. As you might imagine JavaScript based tools have problems in coexisting with asynchronous JavaScript and you better avoid these tools altogether on your Ajax pages.
Both tools also somehow increase the page load time. I couldn’t make reliable measurement, but if load time is a concern, you might want to test thoroughly before a final deployment.
Conclusions
These two tools are so useful and can help you gather so many insights that it would be criminal not to try them. The free subscriptions are limited but still very useful for small websites.
