How Are Visitors Interacting With Your Site? Check Out These 4 Visual Analytics Tools

May 7, 2015

The old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words certainly holds true when you’re trying to maximize your ecommerce conversion rates. Getting a visual representation of your visitors’ interactions with your website can help you find out exactly how people are using your site, and how you can update your interface to maximize conversion rate and increase overall cart size.

There’s no shortage of premium visual analytics solutions available for ecommerce organizations, but knowing which ones are worth your money can sometimes be a bit tricky. Read on to learn more about some of the best tools out there, and how they can help your business.

Knowing which visual analytics solution for ecommerce is worth your money can sometimes be a bit tricky. (Tweet this.)

Inspectlet

Inspectlet is a service that promises “a full user-interaction suite for your site.” This includes things like session recording, heatmap analytics, and form analytics, so on the surface, it would seem that Inspectlet offers everything you would need to find out how customers are using your site, and how you could improve upon that user experience.

Perhaps more importantly, Inspectlet’s filtering ability allows you to limit your analytics to just the individual or individuals you’re interested in learning more about. This is an important feature, since webmasters generally don’t have the time to review every individual session they record. Being able to easily find the customers that interest you ensures that you’ll get the most out of your visual analytics service.

Pricing: Inspectlet offers a free version with basic abilities. Paid versions vary between 20 dollars a month and 120 dollars a month, based on the level of services offered.

Learn more at www.inspectlet.com.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is attempting to market itself as a service that is more powerful than basic Google Analytics, but more reasonably priced than full-fledged eyeball tracking. The company claims that its heatmaps can provide up to 88 percent of the data provided by eye tracking, with a small fraction of the cost and infrastructure investment.

One particularly interesting tool offered by Crazy Egg is the confetti option. As the name suggests, confetti is essentially a multi-colored version of click-tracking analysis. Instead of just tracking clicks, the confetti option allows users to see what kind of groups clicked, comparing user activity by traffic source, keyword source, and more, all with one simple visual.

Pricing: Crazy Egg services start as low as 9 dollars a month. A free 30-day trial is available for first-time users.

Learn more at www.crazyegg.com.

Session Cam

In addition to basic services such as heatmapping and session replay, Session Cam also offers page drop-off analysis between pages and form drop-off analysis on individual pages. As a result, it’s easy for users to pinpoint exactly where things go wrong in the conversion process. In a world where webmasters want to gather as much information from website visitors as possible without scaring them away with too many forms to fill in, the drop-off analysis can help webmasters find the perfect balance.

Another valuable feature of Session Cam is the ability to integrate session data with third-party tools like Google Analyics, Campaign Monitor and CheetahMail. For businesses that are already using these tools, the ability to sync data from their visual analytics tool could be an important differentiator.

Pricing: Plans are available from between 10 and 275 dollars a month, based on the amount of pages recorded. Session Cam also offers enterprise plans with custom pricing, so it may be a good choice for organizations with an extremely large number of pages to record.

Learn more at www.sessioncam.com.

Clicktale

Like the other tools reviewed here, Clicktale offers heatmaps, click analysis, and scroll reach analysis. In addition, the service also offers advanced filtering and demographic analysis, allowing businesses to determine how different types of website visitors are interacting with the website differently.

Clicktale also offers campaign tracking and conversion analysis for email marketing, promising a level of insight into email campaigns that matches the insights it provides for website analysis. For e-commerce businesses that need website analysis and email marketing analysis integrated into a single tool, Clicktale could be a good choice.

Pricing: Clicktale customers choose from either a free plan or a premium plan. Pricing for the premium plan varies, as customers are able to design their own custom plans based on the amount of page views they need recorded.

Learn more at www.clicktale.com

Conclusions

So which visual analytics tool is the best? They all offer a variety of useful tools for ecommerce webmasters, so it’s safe to say that any of them would be better than continuing to rely on hunches and intuition to figure out what works and doesn’t work with your website. The good thing is that all of the tools listed here either provide a free trial or a basic free service, so you’ll have the ability to experiment and find the tool that works best for your company without having to dedicate a lot of resources.

What Can You Do Today?

1) Check out the websites for each provider and get a feel for their services.

2) Start a free trial with the one that appeals to you most and appears to meet your needs.

3) Run a simple heatmap test on your home page to see how visitors are interacting with your site.