Clixpy Website Visitor Monitoring
I’m watching you!
You’re not mistaken, you did just read that correctly.
I am watching you! Before I tell you how let me explain that this post is about visitor tracking.
If you have a website you should have some form of visitor tracking installed so you can see how well your website and specific pages are performing. If you haven’t added Google Analytics to your site then I recommend you register your site and follow the simple instructions over here.
If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog you can install this great Google Analytics plugin and also grab yourself a free desktop Analytics application called Polaris. Polaris uses Adobe Air and is a doddle to set-up. Another cool WordPress plugin is StatPress Reloaded and you can get that from here. Now getting back to what this post is really about…
Why Am I Watching You?
I have been looking for a solution that would allow me to see how users interact with my websites. It is nice to look at your website links and see you have received 10 clicks but it’s much better to see how the clicks came about. I also wanted to address the bounce rate of one of my sites and see why visitors where arriving and leaving would give me a heads-up on fixing this.
Watching someone interact with your website allows you to see if the navigation is user-friendly, if the user uncovers any errors, if the text in your pages, articles and blog posts are engaging enough through the use of headlines, sub-headlines, and so on.
Knowing how your users interact with your website allows you to optimize your best pages, your lead captures and your most clicked affiliate links by moving them to an optimal position.
How Am I Watching You?
Okay, I think Google Analytics is great but it isn’t very exciting looking at a bunch of stats. I’m sure if you have been on the internet for a while now you will have come across screen capture software. Well, now you can use this software to track what your visitors are doing on your website. I found a pretty new website that just does that, allows you to record what your visitors are doing so you can go back and watch the screen capture in replay mode.
Installation is simple and requires dropping a bit of code. Head on over to Clixpy and register for an account (it’s free).
Once you have registered click on the ‘install’ tab at the top of the navigation bar. Now highlight the code, right click and select copy as you’ll now need to paste this code into your website. First I will show you how to do this in WordPress and then using an HTML editor.
In your WordPress admin area click on the link that says ‘Editor’ under the ‘Appearance tab’.
Now on the right you will have the various parts that make up your blog.
Click on ‘header’ and scroll down the code until you find the following tags, <head> </head>. This is where you want to drop your code in between these codes so it looks like this…
To paste your code in right click in a suitable place and select paste. If you are not using WordPress then simply open up your HTML editor and select ‘source’. Load in your websites index page.
Again, paste the code so it is entered just before the closing header tag </head>.
You are now finished. When using the HTML editor make sure you put your index file back onto your server if you edited it on your desktop.
Go back to Clixpy and mak sure you have clicked the record button to ‘on’ to start capturing vistor sessions. The red off button will now display a green on button.
Now all you need to do is log into your admin area and select ‘play sessions’ when you want to see exactly what your visitors are doing on your website.
I hope you will have as much fun as I have had using this great tool. You will be able to capture a limited number of sessions before your free credits will run out. Hit the purchase credits link to purchase additional session credits. You’ll be surprised how cheap they are; 100 captures for $5, 200 captures for $10, 600 captures for $20 (saving $10) and a massive 1000 captures for $30 (saving $20).
This is a no-brainer if you really want to know what your visitors are doing on your site. The information you will be able to collate from using Clixpy will seriously improve your bottom line and conversions.
To your success,
Karl
Great find, I’ll be taking a look at this tomorrow!
The only really useful usability testing I’ve ever done involved just watching someone use the web site; this seems like it will be almost as good but much easier to organise…
.-= Mark Bell´s amazing last blog ..Shannon Richardson: Electrolite =-.
I think it’s a great addition to a conversion strategy. I have another post in the works about Clixpy so be on the look out for it in the next week.
Karl
Hi Karl,
This looks like good fun to me – and tracking what your visitors do has some obvious advantages… but is it worth the time invested? Is it the best use of time? I’ve really not been sure on this topic, but reading this has persuaded me to give it a go.
Cheers
Will
Like any Web Analytics I think the true benefit comes when you have a goal in mind.
For example: if you have just created a new landing page and you are testing it for ease of navigation versus having confused visitors, Clixpy can be great for watching exactly how people are finding thier way around.
I like to use it when we add a new feature to a site that we want people to take action on such as a conversion form. This way we can tell whether they are scrolling straight past it and ignoring the form completely or are they reading it but not engaging with it.
Using Clixpy I can then decide on the changes to make, such as positioning or to simply change the conversion form by bold highlighting some text, adding an image, changing the words, etc.
It all comes down to test, measure and then test again.
I hope this helps,
Karl