Oooh, I just love it when I get to play with new toys. I love it even more when those new toys turn out to be useful tools in a very short period of time.

I recently inherited oversight of a site that seemed to doing alright through the efforts of its previous web guy. It ranked decently for relevant keywords, showed nice new traffic stream, had a good number of pages read per visitor and an acceptable conversion rate. In other words, the previous site handler had all the ducks in a row, so this looked like a nice test bed for some new tracking apps.

My original intent had been to compare the tracking capabilities and results from two similar and competing heatmapping and mouse-trail apps, ClickTail and Mouseflow. Both offer recordings of visitor interaction with your site, both show mouse-movement heatmaps and scroll behaviour, and both claim that this information can help increase usability and conversion. On that last point, at least, both are correct!

As I said, I had no red flags or strong concerns about the site based on what my analytics were telling me, but Clicktale and Mouseflow slapped me in the face with what analytics charts, graphs and data points could not.

First, a brief explanation about the site's home page. The page includes a dominant slideshow element (which does nothing but showcase some work samples), and a top menu bar. That menu bar includes some drop-down, second-level menu items, and in those cases the top-level menu item does not link anywhere. I wonder how many readers are way ahead of me at this point?

So here I am a while back, watching with interest the various interactions of visitors on the home page and what do I see? Oh, the HORROR! Almost every single visit involved a click (or many) on the non-linking slideshow or the non-linking menu item or some sickening combination of both. I could almost hear the thoughts running through the visitor's mind...

"This looks good; I'll click it" - click
"Hmm, musn't have clicked the mouse hard enough." - click
"Errr, is my browser frozen?" - click click
"Arrrgh, stupid site." - exit.

So, long story short - I went through "the tapes", fixed all places where users were clicking on non-linking items (either by linking them to relevant content, removing the item, or removing the visual cue that resulted in a click) and through the next couple of weeks saw a significant increase in page views, an expected rise in time-on-site and a conversion rate that almost doubled!

And all of this was due to watching what the visitors were attempting to do, rather than relying on what my analytics were telling me they had done.

Perhaps now I can get around to comparing the ClickTail and Mouseflow applications themselves. Both have a free, limited trial version.