/How we built/ Clickdensity.com
16/04/2007 | Filed under Design > How we built
Dozens of web apps appear every year to help businesses with productivity, but few are aimed at web analytics. Dan Zambonini explains how Clickdensity became a vital tool
.net: What is Clickdensity and who’s using it?
DZ: Clickdensity is an online suite of nextgeneration usability tools, including heat maps and A/B Testing. It helps you make a better, more profitable website via meaningful insights into the trends and patterns of your visitors. Its users include major brands, from Britvic to a world bank and a global supermarket chain.
.net: What prompted you to make it and do you consider it a web app?
DZ: The idea was conceived in November 2005, when we were working with a usability consultancy. We were optimising an insurance application form for a multinational bank, and the consultants were talking about the results of their usability workshops.
As we discussed how they analysed the videos of people using the application form, it became clear that obvious data wasn’t being collected, which then had to be examined by eye. The consultants were watching where people were clicking on the page – not on links, but on fields within a form. It occurred to us that this data could be collected and visualised.
We created a prototype system and, initially, we deployed it on some of our existing customers’ websites, purely out of interest, to see how it worked. It quickly became apparent that a number of people were interested in seeing similar kinds of reports for their websites.
It’s definitely a web application. We’ve kept the entire workflow online. You can visit the website, try the online demo, sign-up online, view your reports online and even download your PDF receipts online.
.net: What tools were used to build it and how were they applied?
DZ: Most of what you see today was built with Visual Studio, and Fireworks was used for the interface design. Behind this, we’re using Basecamp to manage the product, and Visio for interface mock-ups.
.net: What were the technical challenges?
DZ: To create the heat maps, we had to collect the exact position of every click on a page. Unfortunately, a website has a vast number of ways it can render, whether it’s through different browsers, text size settings, screen resolutions, and whether the design has liquid layout and so on. We spent time ensuring that our JavaScript could record the necessary data.
Then there’s the amount of data we’re handling. The last time I checked, we had thousands of sites sending us click data. Every time someone clicks on any of these sites, we record it. This can be up to a million clicks a day, so we’ve had to manage everything around this.
.net: How can it be used to form a wider web analytics strategy?
DZ: We see Clickdensity as complementing web analytics software. We’re more interested in the general trends and behaviour than numbers.
Standard web analytics is perfect for marketing campaigns, but it tends to be used reactively, and at best offers a new set of questions, such as, “Why is this happening?”. Web analytics can give you a list of issues, and can highlight areas that need attention.
That’s where Clickdensity comes in. By applying it to these key areas, you’ll get a deeper insight into what your visitors are doing, and the ‘why’ will normally emerge quickly after that. I’d say that standard web analytics can be used as step one to identify issues and to help you define measurable goals, such as increasing your conversion rate by 10 per cent. Clickdensity can then be used for steps two and three – to pinpoint the cause of the issues and to implement the best fix using the A/B Testing component. This is a cyclical process of constant refinement and improvement.
.net: How did you test it?
DZ: Creating a prototype helped us identify many of the issues early on. During development, we used our internal testing lab to ensure browser compatibility for a range of browsers and platforms. We then ran a beta-testing programme for almost two months, during which companies were given early, free access to the system. This helped us to iron out smaller issues and had the side-effect of generating an early marketing buzz.
For a project of this complexity, experience has taught us that we should spend the same amount of time planning and testing the product as actually developing it, which is why we ensured that we had three separate phases of eight weeks for planning, development and testing.
.net: How is the visitor experience affected by it?
DZ: When you visit a site using Clickdensity, you won’t notice. We use a piece of compressed JavaScript to send the data back, so there’s no delay to your click.
.net: How did you market the tool?
DZ: We’ve run a few Google AdWords and some print advertising, but mainly it’s been viral/word-of-mouth, via the blogosphere. Once we got mentioned on some of the popular sites, such as Techcrunch, Delicious and StumbleUpon, it started a chain reaction, which is still ongoing. One of the reasons we introduced the free trial and smaller paid packages was to make us ‘blogger-friendly’, so that’s really our main investment in terms of marketing.
.net: How do you think Clickdensity might evolve?
DZ: In terms of direction, we’re focusing on usability and user behaviour rather than pure stats. We want to build Clickdensity into the indispensable toolkit for making a better website, rather than giving you lists of numbers to decipher.
Comments
Terinea Tech Tips / 18/04/2007 / 15:54 / http://www.terinea.co.uk/blogs/terineatechtips
Looks a like a neat product, I wonder how comparable to Google Analytics's>
Luc / 21/04/2007 / 18:07 / http://www.webmasterfarms.com
Nice usability tool. I am wondering myself if google will try to implement the heat mapping and a few of the other features that ClickDensity does well? I guess only time will tell.
Richard Longhurst / 23/04/2007 / 19:42 / http://www.lovehoney.co.uk
I think Clickdensity would be used in conjunction with Google Analytics - that doesn't have heatmaps. Though Google does not provide Website optimiser.
I'd imagine we'd have some fun A/B testing heatmaps on lovehoney.co.uk ;-)
Webstandard-Team / 23/05/2007 / 08:07 / http://webstandard.kulando.de
Clickdensity is a very nice and valuable aplication. If u wanna know how the user moves the mouse you have to try RobotReplay. It lets you record and watch your website visitors in action. View recorded sessions of every mouse movement, click and keystroke. Perfect in combination with Google Analytics!
Paul / 28/10/2007 / 16:51 / http://www.knickersboxersglory.com
It seems like a great addition / alternative to Google Analytics. Google is great for gathering basic information, but this would be a fantastic tool to see exactly how users interact with your site. How often do you check Analytics for basic information, but never act on it. This tool could really improve how a website is designed.
Dave / 18/12/2007 / 13:26 / http://dave.com
Lets face it ... it's a load of bunk.
In every case the user clicks the links or buttons.
The hotspots are going to be around these.
Where, exactly, they click on these buttons or links ... who the hell cares ????
Someone, somewhere said "at acertain res the edge of a button might be off the screen, it will highlight this" ... again, who the hell cares - no-one uses 800x600 anymore and if they do they they deserve to have half of all the websites they visit missing off the edge of the screen ???
Most web people don't give 2 hoots anymore and are quite prepared to loose half of it off the end of the screen at 800x600.
Any other clicks are just because the user has gotton bored and started clicking in the webpage.
Jesus ... and these people are trying to charge £200 p/m for a premium package.
No doubt they'll get that sort of money in this corrupt world of ours where this company has just been given 5 million pounds over 5 yrs to stick 21 websites into a database.
Absolutely disgusting ... we, as taxpayers, should be kicking up a storm over than one.
dave / 20/12/2007 / 19:14
Why are the rest of the world selling components to install on your own server and licensed for under a few hunderd bucks ... and these people think they can charge £200 PER MONTH for something that isn't going to tell you anything you don't already know and they won't even give you the compiled dll to install on your own server ?
What makes them so special they think they can be so mean as to not even let you have a compiled dll, and then have the audacity to charge 3 thousand bucks a year to have the priviledge of using it from their servers ?
At the end of the day we all know that people are just clicking buttons and links ... what this program will be doing is compiling a hit test on BANNERS.
This information they will undoubtedly be selling.
So ... they are chargeing you $3000 per annum to collect and collate data from YOUR website - and then sell this data to the highest bidder.
Lets face it - they should PAYING YOU to let them install their system on your website.
Dave.
John Day / 06/01/2008 / 10:19 / http://www.barbarakelly.co.uk
We like the idea of this tool, and the fact that it's something other than Google Analytics!! We would gladly implement on our site and see if we can glean more data for future development, which is currently being investigated.
Gary / 14/01/2008 / 12:53 / http://www.sexshop365.co.uk
Used this for a while but didnt really give us any more data than you get from a descent analitics package
Adido Web Design / 28/01/2008 / 20:56 / http://www.adido-solutions.com
We've used ClickDensity a number of times before and it's opened up our eyes to a number of different ways to improve the websites that we've designed.
Dave Roberts / 07/02/2008 / 13:30 / http://www.junewinters.co.uk
I like the idea behind this. Google Analytics can be found lacking in many ways and I think this application could fill some gaps.
