If you’ve been reading CN for a while, you know we like ClickTale. We said that Omniture should acquire the service and we’ve also interviewed the ClickTale CEO, Tal Schwartz. ClickTale is basically a worldwide virtual usability lab for your Web site, application, ecommerce site or blog.

Today the company is launching a new product — Form Analytics. Over my career I’ve seen several products do something similar but not to the scale that ClickTale is. From the ClickTale blog, "Form Analytics reveals how visitors interact with online forms and provides recommendations that can increase shopping cart conversion, form completion rates and reduce visitor abandonment."

Form Analytics is currently in beta and includes three reports: Time, Blanks, and Refills. Tal tells me that additional reports will be coming out soon. The Time report shows you how long people are spending on your forms. It gets even crazier with the Advanced Time report which shows you how much time was spent with each individual field. Blanks provides you with details on which fields users are leaving blank when submitting a form. And lastly, the Refills report provides details on how often a user is forced to redo some part of their entered data.

Based on their initial testing, they’ve seen two common errors that developers and content creators are making. One is around ZIP codes and not taking into account non-U.S. postal codes. The other is password fields which don’t provide any specifics on the type of password required which forces the user to refill the form.

My hope is that they provide regular blog posts with more form analytics data - optimizing your forms can return huge value and they could offer excellent guidance with the aggregated data.

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After last year’s acquisition post, I thought it would be interesting to look at 5 great acquisition targets for 1st quarter 2008. I do not have financials for any of these companies, so I am working from a base of technology and visibility. For each company I list, I have also listed a possible buyer along with my commentary on why the purchase makes sense. Do you agree or disagree?

AOL

Buyer: Yahoo

Why: Yahoo needs to expand its base of distribution for the Yahoo ad platform. What better way than to acquire the population segment who uses AOL and loves it? AOL users click ads which means a potential cash win for Yahoo sa they could integrate contextually-relevant advertising into AOL, something AOL doesn’t do currently. It would also give them access into Hulu thru the AOL Video portal. It might even perk up the employee morale which I read has been quite low this past year.

Zoho

Buyer: IBM

Why: A couple times each week I read about IBM wanting to own the services market. Acquiring Zoho would give IBM a foothold into Web 2.0 and since Zoho targets the small business, would give IBM a chance to sell the small business on even more IBM-based services. It could even help IBM to slowly become a household name again in the Web space, something that they have no real presence in today.

Clicky

Buyer: Webtrends

Why: Webtrends is so completely out of the Web game, it’s sad. I remember beta testing the first version of Webtrends in the mid-90s and watched the company never move forward. Clicky is hot, both from the application-side and the buzz-side, and could be a good fit for Webtrends. Most small businesses need simple Web analytics and while Clicky is more robust than just simple, it would give a slow entry into the current Web market for Webtrends. That is of course if they actually want to move forward, something I’ve wondered for eight years now.

CrazyEgg/ClickTale

Buyer: Omniture

Why: To help Omniture move further into the Web testing market and provide a rounded suite of tools for their clients. Last year I said that CrazyEgg should be acquired by a large creative agency but I’ve changed my mind and am going with Omniture. CrazyEgg and ClickTale provide the testing and Omniture provides the analytics - I could see some nice A/B type testing with these acquisitions.

Pageflakes/Netvibes

Buyer: Yahoo

Why: Both Pageflakes and Netvibes have good footings into the early adopter, "cool techie" segments. This is a segment which Yahoo lacks on but could be a very influential segment for buzz. Completed correctly, Yahoo could (once again) start to get their search and other products in front of the early adopter, blogger crowd which can be an excellent way for Yahoo to get messages out and have forced use of their technology.

Note: Zoho is a current sponsor of CN.

ClickTale is announcing today that it has secured funding from YL Ventures, a boutique European venture capital firm. ClickTale is the first to use the term "Web Interaction Analytics" and whose service enables websites to record and watch movies of their users’ browsing sessions, will use the proceeds of the funding round to expand the sales and the feature set of their hosted service. Amount of the round was not disclosed.

YL Ventures’ Managing Partner, Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf, will be joining the ClickTale board of directors as part of this funding round.

ClickTale allows you to watch what your users do on your site, every mouse movement, every click and every scrolling action, as if it was a real focus group. We reviewed ClickTale when they launched the beta in April and you can read our interview with Founder Tal Schwartz. I’ve used ClickTale several times and find it to be very informative and can help you see flaws and quickly get to the optimum setup.

In other ClickTale news, they just released their Scrolling Research Report V2.0 - Part 2: Visitor Attention and Web Page Exposure on the ClickTale Blog. There is a ton of data and information in the report but here are the net take-aways:

• The most valuable web page real-estate is located near the page top, between 0 and 800 pixels. Visitor Attention and Page Exposure peak at about the 540 pixel-line.
• If you have a long web page, add “stop points” such as headers and images to prevent your visitors from quickly scrolling down the page. It will prevent their attention from waning towards the end of the page.
• The footer of your page is important! Users do pay quite a bit of attention to that area of your page.

Has one of your stories hit the front page on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc? What I find is that the traffic from these social sites is great (some sites live off this traffic) but the conversion is horrible. Many speak about the way these users spend less than one second on a site and do nothing on the site itself. No RSS pickup, no ad clicks, nothing, a pack of sheep moving from site to site. This is frustrating for me as a marketer — all of these visitors and no real way to capitalize on them. Even if they would just take my RSS feed for a day, I would consider that a win. A click on an advertisement would be gold - not because I might pick up a few cents but because my sponsors would see a higher rate of return and my visitors would learn about these services (which I handpick).

I decided to change the game for some of these social visitors. I spent a good bit of time analyzing exactly what these users do when they visit CN. And the results were sad. Visit the page, leave. Over and over I saw this pattern thousands of times. In my new test group, users clicked the ads an average of 7% more and picked up the CN feed 12% more than in the non-modified group. I consider that a huge gain. The key is a simple thing I learned early in my career as a salesman at The Wiz. Welcoming someone by name will increase the likelyhood of a purchase. A person’s name is the most beautiful sound they can hear. In this case, I used the referring social media site as their name.

The test was relatively simple. I used "seconds" to define whether the visitor would be part of the "modified" group. Odd, yes - even, no. Both groups saw the exact same article and same Web site. The only difference was the inclusion of a "name" box for the modified group which is shown below (it’s a mockup example). What this name box did was call out to the user "Hello!" and drew attention to it.

The box included the following elements:

• Welcome from x site
• Message about RSS with orange RSS icon
• Targeted ad

As for the specific ad types, gadget ads appear to work best for Digg visitors, while content ads worked better for Stumblers.

The great thing about what I setup is that only visitors from those sites saw the box. Many sites will run a "Welcome Digg’rs" type message when their story hits Digg but everyone will see that message. So not only are you not welcomed by name, you are welcomed by someone else’s name. I found that this tactic didn’t work as I had hoped over the past year.

My test has concluded and I am very pleased with the results. The next step is to refine the Welcome box and determine what it might look like going forward. Should every Digg user see it every time? Should a user be able to close it permanently? How far can I push it before I annoy the new visitor. It’s important to keep the brand and trust high.

As you can see a simple change returned dramatic results. And it has me wondering, who else can I welcome?

(tools used include: GetClicky, CrazyEgg, TapeFailure and ClickTale)

The team at ClickTale have released a report from data they gathered from users of the ClickTale service. It would be great if other services such as TapeFailure and CrazyEgg did the same thing. As long as the data is not identified down to the individual service user, this type of data can do two important things: teach us about trends and sell their service! The report provided by ClickTale is very detailed and is a great selling point for why you should be using ClickTale.

The report released today discusses amount of scrolling a site visitor is willing to process. What would be great is to know what type of sites make up the report. For example, people might be more willing to scroll further on a blog than on a product site or a corporate brochure, etc. Most blogs seem to have a good bit of scrolling, especially on the home page.

A few of the interesting conclusions from the Scrolling Report:

• Almost identical percentages of page views (15%-20%) reach the page bottom regardless of page height.
• It appears that regardless of page height, scrolling reach is very similar on the relative scale with some resemblance to a linear model (or a very flat exponential): between 64% to 68% of the page views are likely to reach the 1K pixel line and 15% to 20% will reach the bottom of the page.
• It appears that visitors scroll in a relative way - about the same percentage of page views will reach the middle of a web page regardless of the actual page height in pixels.

Do you believe that blogs have changed the way we scroll on a Web page? From the old days where the belief was to fit as much as possible on the first screen, I would say they have. Check out our previous ClickTale coverage.

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.