Marketers who aim high go for recording website users so that they will come to know why the visitors to their websites take certain decisions and also the reason for their bouncing. From the recordings one can find out the decisions taken by the visitors including where they clicked or bounced.
Implementation couldn’t be easier
The recording of website users commences as soon as the visitors click the shopping cart. In case of abandonment, the marketer can find out why it happened. The website users recording can be customized. The recording will also show which items of the menu had maximum number of clicks and which items were completely ignored by the visitors. From the interaction of the visitor with the website the bugs such as broken links or faulty JavaScript can be identified. Various platforms are available today for recording website users. The marketer should ensure to select the right website recorder so that it will meet his requirements. The recording software is to be installed on the website strictly as per instructions given by the software developers.
Record your visitors whenever you need
The extent of recording depends on the platform used by the marketer. No website recorder will record the activities of every visitor. It will carry out sampling of the website users over a specific period of time. Normally the website users recordings are filtered so as to take up only those that are of interest to the marketer. The website users recording systems enable the marketers to mask the information that are of sensitive nature like name, passwords, email address and home address etc. This will ensure protection from legal hassles. The marketers are supposed to make extra effort to identify the goals of the visitors. As a result of recording the visitor’s activity the marketer will be able to properly optimize his website for more conversions. Moreover, after going through the recordings of visitor activity the marketer will not change the elements in haste.
Understand how the visitors use the website
The marketer will start to focus more on his audience after going through the website users recordings. Once the issues are identified, he will be able to improve the website. The marketer should ensure that the website recording platform which he has chosen facilitates smooth A/B testing. When the A/B testing is carried out the discrepancies will be brought to the attention of the marketer and the discrepancies will be rectified with a new platform. It is also important to view sufficient number of visitor interactions so as to obtain the most accurate results. Before taking final decisions pertaining to improvement of the website the marketer should see to it that he watches a few hours of video. The ultimate purpose is to get a clear idea as to how most of the visitors are using the website.
Hotjar
Those who use the Hotjar software for recording website users are able to view on real-time the things viewed by the visitors on the web page. Using Hotjar one can record either every web page or a particular page. Those who want to focus on optimize landing, product and pricing will opt for recording of specific page. When the duration of the session which is to be recorded is more than 30 seconds, Hotjar allows the user to configure. Hotjar can be used on WP, Drupal, Joomla, Shopify and Light CMS, etc., with one script.
Smartlook
Smartlook is a software that delivers qualitative analytics. The main features of Smartlook include recording of website users, click heatmaps, event tracking and funnels. From the video recordings of the visitors sessions one can see how the visitors interact with the website. The marketer can watch the replays to detect errors and to find out areas of improvement. One can clearly understand the experiences of the visitors by closely watching the movement of the mouse, the clicks and the form interactions.
I tried Smartlook some time ago and I was disappointed not with features, but it had a problem with caching mechanism of e-commerce solutions that we use in our company. It worked fine with websites without CSS cache. But I gave it a second try a week ago and now it works fine. So now I will have to do a comparison between Smartlook and Hotjar, a tool that is in use.