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We reviewed ClickTale earlier this year when they moved into a private beta. It's a pretty groovy testing app in the same category with TapeFailure and CrazyEgg. Mashable has a great overview of the updated product. I asked Tal Schwartz, ClickTale Founder, for an interview to learn more about ClickTale and he was kind enough to jump away from the launch madness to answer my questions and our chat log is provided below. His answer regarding Israeli startups is fascinating.

Allen: Can you provide a brief background about yourself?

Tal: I am a technology entrepreneur and educator. Over the past few years, I have founded, mentored and advised several Israeli and US-based startups. In addition, I teach entrepreneurship at the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology. I enjoy learning new things, solving interesting problems, and working on projects that make a positive impact on people's lives.

Allen: What is ClickTale and where did the idea come from?

Tal: My co-founder and CTO, Arik Yavilevich, and I met at the Technion. Arik always wanted to understand what visitors were doing on his websites. He was frustrated by traditional web analytics that provide high level statistics and decided to find a better way to understand user behavior.

Arik and our R&D team developed our patent pending technology to give website owners the ability to watch movies of users' browsing sessions; every mouse movement, every click and every scrolling action can be recorded and watched as a movie. ClickTale also combines thousand of user sessions into meaningful reports of user behavior inside-the-webpage.

The ClickTale service is a continuous, worldwide, non-intrusive virtual usability lab and should be an indispensable part of every website and web application development cycle. By gaining a deeper understanding of visitor behavior, website owners can improve website usability, increase conversion rates, and easily discover errors and bugs.

Allen: How does the service work?

Tal: ClickTale is a hosted service, so no server software installation is needed and setup takes only a few minutes. Webmasters add a small amount of javascript code to their webpages. The javascript collects browsing data and transmits it to the ClickTale servers for processing. ClickTale creates movies of browsing sessions almost instantaneously and webmasters can log-in securely at anytime to view these movies.

Allen: Is ClickTale a replacement for the analytics software I use today or a complement?

Tal: We designed ClickTale to complement existing web analytics packages. Since ClickTale typically records a random subset of your daily visitors, you would still want to use an analytics package to track all your visitors' aggregate behavior.

Allen: You released a new version of the app today. Can you give us an overview of the new features?

Tal: We just released our new generation of ClickTale Heatmaps which include Link Analytics. The new Link Analytics deliver information that is not available anywhere else about the way website visitors interact with links. This information is combined with the Scrolling Map overlay to provide a full graphical representation of visitor behavior inside the page.

Knowing the number of clicks each link generates is important, but combining that with how many people hovered over that link and you're talking abut a serious degree of data. Still, it doesn't end there. Link Analytics reports how many of those hovers eventually turn into clicks, how much time it took for a user to decide on a link, and more. Here are some of the new metrics you have access to:

• Clicks, we count the number of clicks and the percent of the total clicks on every link.
• Visitors who Clicked are the number of unique visitors who clicked on a link as well as the fraction of total visitors.
• Hovers over Links, the number of mouse hovers over a link. This tells how attractive a link is to the visitor, but not necessarily attractive enough for a click.
• Hovers to Clicks, is the portion of mouse hovers that eventually convert into mouse clicks.
• Hesitation is the average time from beginning of a mouse hover to the moment of the mouse click.
• Hover Time is the average time mouse hovers over a link, indicating visitor interest level.
• Time to Click is the average time between the moment a page has been loaded to the moment a link is clicked. You can now discover which links are most attractive by seeing the average time it takes to click on them.
• Hover Order ranks the links by the average order in which they were hovered-over by visitors. Shows which links attract the mouse first, second and so on.

To read more go to the ClickTale blog.

Allen: Any good stories to share of customers increasing revenue based on the changes they made from the ClickTale reports?

Tal: One of our customers, RestorationSOS.com, noticed within a few days of using ClickTale that there were many service requests made through their website than were never received by customer service reps. Seeing the recorded user requests and not receiving them, prompted an examination of the entire order processing system. The problem was narrowed down to a specific server and, as soon as that server was upgraded, service requests and revenues jumped by 35%. ClickTale turned out to be extremely valuable and had a huge impact on the bottom line of RestorationSOS.com.

There are many more stories. We already posted 4 case studies in our blog and a bunch more will be added in there near future. To read these go to: http://blog.clicktale.com/.

Allen: Who are your competitors?

Tal: We know of two companies that have some recording capabilities: TapeFailure and RobotReplay. As far as I know, neither provide heatmaps.

Allen: Do you have a monetization plan? If so, can you share some details? Are you funded?

Tal: We're offering a variety of pricing plans, the basic one- consisting of 100 recordings per week- continues to be free of charge. Other plans range from $19 to $99 per month and offer increased recordings and advanced features such as e-mail support, advanced search capabilities, a longer recording history, SSL encryption, and the ability to record HTTPS pages. More details are available at: http://www.clicktale.com/pricing.html.

Allen: What's coming in the next 3-6 months for ClickTale?

Tal: In the next 3-6 months we will continue to work hard to make ClickTale even better. We will add new and innovative reports that will provide our customers with additional insights and value. Stay tuned.

Allen: What's the Web market like in Israel?

Tal: There are many innovative Israeli Internet startups creating amazing products and services. The community is lively and meets regularly at large conferences, as well as at smaller gatherings.

Israel is a great place to start an Internet company because there are so many smart and creative people around. Here are some interesting facts:

• Israel has the highest number of scientists and engineers per capita in the world.
• Israel has the highest number of patents per capita in the world.
• Israel is blessed with the highest number of startups per capita in the world.
• There are more Israeli startups listed on the NASDAQ than any other country outside of North America.

I think you will be hearing about many more Internet startups coming out of Israel in the future.

Allen: Which RSS feeds are you reading these days?

Tal: Techcrunch, Paul Graham and Guy Kawasaki.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 1:34 pm and is filed under analytics, Interviews, ClickTale, testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.