clickdensity Blog

White Label clickdensity now available

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:39:01 GMT

We're very pleased to announce the immediate availability of white labeling functionality within clickdensity.

You can now brand the unique usability service as your own, to allow tighter aesthetic integration with your existing product/service suite, or to re-sell (using our multi-user account feature) into a new market.

The white labelling features allow you to:

Rename clickdensity, and the URLs in all text.
Customise the product logo.
Modify contact email addresses.
Modify key page content (Help, Getting Started, Terms and Privacy Policy).
Hide the clickdensity blog.
Modify the logout URL.

You'll find the new 'Account Branding' options under the 'Your Account' menu item once you've logged in to http://my.clickdensity.com

Giving other users access to your clickdensity account – new feature

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:00:22 GMT

One of our most common feature requests has been for the ability to create basic user logins that provide third parties (or other users) with access to your clickdensity reports. We’ve taken this idea and expanded on it, and are pleased to announce that we’ve just made the new features live!

If you’re an agency, or another organisation that produces clickdensity reports for your customers, this now means that you can give them individual access directly to their reports (no need to create screenshots and email them any more!). Or, if you want to give more control than just viewing reports, this is all possible too - through some fine-grained (but easy to configure) permissions.

On the Your Account page, you’ll now see a new ‘configure user accounts’ button:

Click the button to access a list of all additional users who you have configured under your account (this list will initially be empty).

Creating a new user is easy. Enter their username and email address (a random password is generated and emailed to them automatically), then choose what type of access they should have. You can limit access to particular website reports, and to specific features within clickdensity.

If you have any suggestions for how to improve this new feature-set, or want to suggest other new features, please get in touch!

HTTP Authentication on your site? No problem.

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:13:42 GMT

We've just added a new feature that will allow you to use clickdensity reporting on websites that are secured by HTTP Authentication (e.g. through an htaccess file). This supports both Basic and Negotiate authorisation methods.

We also support form-based authorisation methods, if the form is posted back to the same page.

Drop us a line on what you'd like to see added next...

Updated, easier sign-up

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:35:27 GMT

We've just updated the clickdensity payment and sign-up process to make life easier for you. New features include:

Streamlined, faster sign-up process
You can easily switch between different currencies (US Dollars, Pounds Sterling, Euros)
You can pay monthly or annually (get 1 month free when paying annually!)
You can pay by invoice online
You can now also pay with PayPal
Customers can easily downgrade at any time (you can still upgrade at any time too!)
For free trial accounts, we've extended the amount of time you can still view the reports by a week

On a different note, it's heart-warming to see people continue to discover the benefits of clickdensity. Top 5 Web Analytics Apps that are better than Google Analytics is one such article that makes us happy, and it's always nice to read that although we may not have the fancy colour scheme of some other products, we are still the one "[he] uses".

Half-a-billion clicks!

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:30:43 GMT

Due to the continued phenomenal success of clickdensity, we're on track to record half-a-billion clicks within the next month; thanks for helping to make this happen! As such, we've been investing heavily in our server infrastructure: last week, we doubled our capacity and processing power.

We'll be launching our affiliate and reseller features soon (allowing you to white-label the administration interface, and manage multiple user accounts with granular permissions), so stay tuned. After that, we'll be adding yet more features to the reporting interface, to give you new insight into your visitors' behavior. If you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see, please send them through!

6 simple steps to a slicker site

Mon, 14 May 2007 16:59:52 GMT

In just a few hours you can improve your website usability, increase conversion rates, evaluate your information architecture, or enhance click-through rates, by following these six simple steps.

1. Set-up

Visit www.clickdensity.com, sign up for a free trial, and install the javascript tracking code on your home page. You'll need to wait until you've collected a few thousand clicks before proceeding to the next step (so that you have a representative sample of visitor data).

2. Solve

Before enhancing the positive areas of your page (where you want people to click), lets first eliminate "artificial links" - elements on your page which visitors are frustratingly clicking because they look clickable, but aren't.

View the Click Map report in clickdensity, which displays "link" clicks in green (i.e. clicks on hyperlinks or other clickable targets), and "non-link" clicks in red. Look for concentrations of red clicks on individual elements - this is usually a sign that a number of people are mistakenly assuming it is clickable. Update the style/design of any such elements accordingly, to reduce your visitors' frustration.

3. Sort

For the next step, we want to maximise and prioritise the visibility of "positive" links on your page (those you want the visitor to click).

View the Heat Map report in clickdensity; this will show exactly where visitors are (and aren’t) clicking, with the most popular regions in "hotter" colours.

Examine your main navigation devices (top menus, side menus, footers), and check the usage patterns. If there are items that are rarely clicked, these could be good candidates for re-wording (do visitors know what they mean?), re-prioritizing (moving down the menu), or possibly re-locating altogether (into a sub-section or elsewhere). Conversely, popular links in sub- navigation devices (e.g. footers) are good candidates for prioritization (moving into more obvious locations or menus), or this could be an indicator that the content from these popular sub-sections should be made available on the current page.

Other (non-menu) 'lists' on your page should undergo similar analysis. For example, if you're displaying the latest five blog/news items, but only the most recent two or three are ever clicked (possibly because you have a high percentage of returning visitors), then this is a candidate for contraction (to fewer items), freeing-up the space for more valuable content.

The Heat Map report will also highlight other patterns of user behavior, specific to your website. For example, the majority of visitors may click the thumbnails of story links rather than the text links, or there may be particular areas of the page that are busier (and potentially more 'visible') than other areas.

4. Stimulate

We can now attempt to identify and reduce confusion and hesitation, using click-time data.

View the Hover Map report in clickdensity; this will show usage data for individual elements. Hover your mouse pointer over the most important/popular elements on the page. A 'typical' click-time distribution is seen in the image below; peaking at around 1 or 2 seconds, then quickly falling off, with a long-tail.

If your important/popular elements are displaying a flatter/more varied shape, such as that shown below (which was for the most important element on the page), this could suggest that visitors are not easily discovering the link/image.

These important elements could be made more visible, by prioritizing their location on the page, increasing their contrast (in a generic sense, with respect to their surrounding content), or otherwise re-styling or re-labelling.

A complementary method for identifying usage change over time is to switch back to the Heat Map report, and use the Click Time filter to produce two different reports; one for 'faster' clicks (e.g. < 10 seconds), and one for 'slower' clicks (e.g. 31-60 seconds). These will enable you to spot more generic trends in usage. For example, if your Search facility and Site Map link are used more heavily in the slower (31-60) report, this could imply that a significant number of your visitors are unable to find the information they require on the page, and are resorting to the Site Map/Search after first scanning the page for the content or navigational sign-posting.

5. Segment

In the last step, we introduced the idea of identifying problems by comparing patterns of user behavior from two different groups (those who clicked quickly, and those who clicked slowly).

We can gain further valuable insight by continuing with this approach - using the clickdensity report filters to compare segments of visitors (those that share similar attributes).

In the Heat Map reports, click the Show Advanced checkbox, to view all the filtering options. Try first filtering by Screen Size, to check if any of your important elements further down the page are missed by visitors with smaller resolutions.

Next, enter one of your Goal Page URLs into the Went To box, and update the report (a 'goal page' URL will be a page that you want users to visit, e.g. a purchase confirmation page, or a sign-up form). This will only show clicks from users who - at some point in their session - visit this goal page, and will therefore help you analyze exactly which "routes" (links, menu items, adverts) are and aren't working towards this goal.

You may also want to try segmenting by date; we often find different modes of use between weekday visitors and weekend visitors (for example, as identified in this research on museum websites), which may persuade you to re-distribute Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns (e.g. away from weekends, towards mid-week, or vice-versa).

6. Split Test

Some of the previous steps will have raised questions and hypotheses regarding your current page, with no clear solution or answer. Luckily, there is a simple way to test possible solutions.

Conceive and create a potential fix for one of the problem areas on your page (e.g. a new graphic for an advert that isn't performing, or a re-worded menu item). Then, visit the main administration page in clickdensity, click the a/b tests button, and add a test.

In clickdensity, A/B Tests work by replacing an existing element on your page (Version A) with a different version (Version B), for 50% of your visitors. Ensure that the element you want to replace (whether it is an <img>, <a>, <div> or something else) is assigned an id attribute, then use the form to specify the HTML for the new version (version B), and the number of times you want the test to run. You can preview the two versions (original A and new B), to check that the code is correct.

Once the tests have run for a number of your visitors, you can use the A/B Test Reports to check if click-through rates, goal page visits, or some other pre-defined metric has changed positively. In the example below, we can see that the new version under test (Version B) produces almost twice as many click-throughs, the majority of which then go on to visit the Goal Page.

Conclusion

We've presented a series of six simple steps that anyone can perform to evaluate and improve their website. These steps can be used on all your key pages, and can be iterated, to continually refine your site.

London anniversary celebration!

Tue, 08 May 2007 10:48:49 GMT

On Wednesday 6^th June 2007, clickdensity will be celebrating its first year anniversary! To mark the occasion, we'll be holding a party in London, at a top secret location (OK, so we haven't decided where yet). We'll be providing the drinks, some food, and some stimulating conversation.

If you'd like to attend, drop us a line and we'll send you the details; places are limited, and will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.

As an aside, we're just about to record click number 150,000,000... Thanks for all your data, and keep those clicks rolling in!

Packages update - more sites per package

Fri, 04 May 2007 09:46:12 GMT

Hot on the heels of our new click-time graphs, we're pleased to announce an update to our packages. Effective immediately, we're significantly increasing the number of sites that you can configure in most packages:

	Trial	Starter	Builder	Standard	Plus	Premium
No. of Sites (Old)	1	1	1	3	5	10
No. of Sites (New)	1	1	10	25	50	Unlimited

Analysing click time - new feature

Wed, 02 May 2007 10:53:03 GMT

If you read our latest research paper, you may have noticed that we mined the clickdensity database to produce some of the results, e.g.

This data gave us unique, valuable insights into the behavior of users. That got us thinking that we should make similar data easily accessible from the clickdensity reports.

So, today, we're very excited to announce a new feature in the Hover Map report! When you hover over any element in a page, you'll now not just see the average click time, but also a detailed graph of how many visitors are clicking during the first 30 seconds. In fact, we've also added a 'mode' average, as well as the current 'mean', just as a little bonus.

Using this information, you'll be able to better segment your visitors, identify visibility issues, and build up a better understanding of how your visitors are interacting with different aspects of your website.

clickdensity paper and interview now online

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:06:46 GMT

So we've just got back from San Francisco, where we presented our clickdensity research for museum websites. You can read the paper online; we hope to have the presentation -- which contains a few extra findings -- ready for publication shortly.

In further clickdensity publications news, we were featured in the British .net magazine last month, and you can now read the interview part of the feature on their website.

We have a couple of exciting new clickdensity developments almost ready for launch; I won't say too much at the moment, but watch this space in the coming week or two...