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May 22, 2013

ClickTale Touch Enables Retailers to Understand Consumer Behavior on Mobile Sites

There’s a very high chance that you are one of the billions of smartphone users in the world today, or maybe even one of the 85 percent of smartphone users that would rather give up water than mobile apps. The point is, mobility has become an enormous, critical part of consumers’ and businesses’ day-to-day lives. Companies are adapting to this by creating and optimizing their websites for the mobile landscape, but as you may have already realized, not everyone is doing it right. Some mobile websites lack responsive design, some have images that are way too large for a smartphone screen and some just aren’t zoom-and-scroll friendly.

A growing number of consumers are also using mobile devices as a replacement for a trip to the mall; an eMarketer study found that U.S. retail m-commerce sales rose to nearly $25 billion in 2012, an 81-percent increase over the previous year. However, when it comes to developing mobile websites, companies are pretty much in the dark about knowing whether they are effective or not. Until now.

ClickTale is a provider of customer experience analytics solutions to optimize usability and maximize conversion rates for any website. It is taking is desktop analytics capabilities one step further and expanding them to the mobile device with the launch of ClickTale Touch, which reveals mobile device users’ behaviors while on a website, including where they tap on screen, how long they spend on different parts of a Web page and what trends are common among multiple consumers.

I spoke with Dr. Tal Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of ClickTale, to discuss the industry today and how ClickTale helps companies embrace the mobile revolution.

“It’s growing at an exponential rate and we’re really in the early days of mobile,” Schwartz said. “We’re kind of like in the mid-‘90s now compared to where we were when the Web was launched – there’s very little knowledge of what the best practices are and how the mobile Web really should be designed and built, and that’s why there are so many mistakes. There’s a big opportunity out there to really make it much, much better.”

One of the most unique capabilities ClickTale Touch offers is the ability to imagine and recreate a scenario as if you were right next to a mobile user on a website. The ClickTale session player shows users what device consumers were on, where they tapped, zoomed, pinched and swiped throughout a website, and even shows the tilt of the device itself, helping companies understand what works and what does not on their mobile websites.

ClickTale Touch also offers exposure, tap and attention heat maps to gauge exactly where consumers are clicking, looking, scrolling and engaging on a website. They can also view breakpoints in the attention of visitors, offering a clear indication of content that interests visitors.

One example Schwartz discussed was a company that featured an identical navigation bar at the top of its mobile website. Users were clicking on the navigation tab that they wanted to visit, but weren’t scrolling down to realize the page had indeed refreshed to what they were looking for. This was causing frustration on visitors’ ends and a missed opportunity for that company’s content on that specific page. Using ClickTale Touch allowed the company to realize what it was like for visitors and reshape the design and mobile site experience to match their needs.

“It’s about time that this technology is out there,” Schwartz said. “Many businesses are scared to launch a mobile site because they don’t have any idea of best practices and they don’t want to make mistakes. Now, they can actually do things in beta and try things out, see the visitor behavior and clean out major bugs before it goes live. I hope we can help accelerate their mobile presence and improve the mobile experience for visitors online.”




Edited by Alisen Downey


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