• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 16, 2010

It sounds a little creepy, but effective. The content on a Web site that prompts people to open their wallets and spend more than $2,500 to design a closet showcasing Jimmy Choo shoes and Tory Burch shirts should give marketers a confidence boost by providing the tools to target very specific consumers.

This technology digitally records every keystroke, click, and scroll up or down the page site visitors make. While Omniture and Webtrends count clicks, Clicktale records the movement, collects the raw data, and turns it into a segmented heat map. The data becomes searchable by specific criteria.

A small line of JavaScript inserted in the bottom of each Web site page identifies where conversions rates fall short and what makes people read, click or buy. The code allows companies to digitally video record the moment of site visitors, capturing every keystroke, mouse click, movement and scroll down the page that site visitors make. Digital videos get captured, stored and made searchable on a dashboard through a portal Clicktale launched in April. The technology aims to give marketers an actual representation of customers by segmenting age, gender, dislikes, likes and more.

Clicktale's heat map technology not only tells marketers what words site visitors view, but how long they peruse a section on the page, how far they scroll down the page, how long they look at images in view, and if they try to get somewhere on the page, but didn't make it.

Clients like California Closets use the technology to identify site visitors taking specific actions on their Web site. For example, through a portal marketers can search for people who visited the home page, became more interested in the product's price rather than the features, viewed between nine and 16 pages of the Web site, and finally got to the signup page, but never clicked on the submit button.

Let's assume 140 site visitors match the description. A list gets created on the client's dashboard accessed through a Web portal. Marketers can click on each to watch the digital video of events that took place on the site for any of the 140 specific visitors, or aggregate the data from all to create a heat map for that segmented audience.

Shmuli Goldberg, director of marketing and communications at Clicktale, says the company will only capture keystrokes if the site visitor agrees to be tracked. They must tick the box next to the copy that reads "I have read and agree to the terms of use," before submitting the form. For example, the client will only know a potential customer visited the site and began filling out a registration form, but didn't complete the process. The technology won't tie that form into the rest of the consumer's visit.

Clicktale offers four types of aggregated tracking reports. The most recent, which launched earlier this month to enterprise customers (defined as companies with more than 3 million page views on their Web site) lets marketers aggregate raw data representing up to 100,000 site visitors and create a segmented heat map. All paying clients can trial the segmentation feature for the next two months. The latest feature tracks the movement of the site visitor's mouse and allows marketers to segment the data.

Goldberg believes there's a correlation between eye and mouse movement on Web sites. The most recent that launched earlier this month adds to others that track the information site visitors read, length of time it takes for them to get through the content, how far they scroll down the Web site page, and where they click on or copy a portion of the text on the page.

But processing and sorting the huge amount of data this technology captures proves challenging. It took nearly a year for Clicktale engineers to develop a method to extract and segment the valuable data. Wal-Mart Stores experienced a similar problem when it began experimenting with radio frequency identification (RFID) as a supply chain tracking technolog.

It required consumer packaged goods companies like Kimberly Clark and Procter & Gamble to affix RFID tags to cartons and pallets shipped from manufacturing facilities into the retailer's warehouses. A software application collected and dumped the tons and tons of raw data into what the industry affectionately called a "black box," so they could sort through it later.

It appears the advertising and marketing industry can learn from the mistakes of others on how to segment the data as it streams in.