Site owners wanting to understand their users better will soon be able to use a new statistics service called ClickTale that can report the exact dynamic behavior of a user on a given Web page,
according to TechCrunch. Other services like Hitwise, Nielsen/NetRatings and Google Analytics make various approximations about users' actions through samples, clickstream data, etc., but none monitor
the precise behavior of each user. In fact, ClickTale lets users view video of individual browsing sessions. That's right: every mouse movement, every click, every keystroke--this would be a hell of a
tool for identity thieves. The idea, of course, isn't to make keystroke logging easier, but rather to improve Web site usability and effectiveness, by watching how your users interact with your site.
However, if you've got hundreds of thousands of users, you couldn't possibly make use of all that video, so ClickTale aggregates some of the more useful rich data, like "time spent on each page," or
"the percent of each page viewed by users," or even, "the percent of each page viewed and how many times users scrolled to the Web page's bottom." ClickTale will be available to anyone--from large
corporations greedy for more data to casual bloggers. It's a hosted service requiring no installation on a company's server; Webmasters add just a small piece of javascript code to their Web pages.
ClickTale guards against privacy by not recording individual user data. No activity is recorded outside the Web page--no personal files, no Internet history, no interactions with software, no other
Web sites. Passwords are also never recorded.
Read the whole story at TechCrunch »
