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Web 2.0 - Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Google Analytics Has No Designs On Heatmaps; Clicktale Wins Funding

We are here in Las Vegas at Pubcon. One of the better presentations today was on Web analytics. The star was Google group manager and former Urchin co-founder Brett Crosby (rival Bill Schmarzo, VP of Advertiser Analytics no-showed it and took some arrows for that). Crosby explained that Google Analytics had a dearth of updates for some time after Urchin was bought by Google but said that they are on a tear now and he let the audience know about some upcoming features. (BTW, we'd post his prezo but Google now has a policy not to do this as one exec posted a prezo with numbers that were not for public consumption.)

One person in the audience asked if Google Analytics would launch heatmaps or tools to allow web managers to watch user interactions. Crosby indicated that while he thinks such tools are a cool idea, they are low on the his group's product roadmap.

Clicktale's screencast

That might be good news for Israel's Clicktale which today is announcing that it has raised a round of funding.

Alongside their announcement, Clicktale gave us some data to chew on:
+ While most web pages have a vertical scroll-bar, visitors scrolled all the way to the bottom in only 20% of the recorded visits.

+ Users scroll based on relative position inside the page, not based on absolute position in terms of pixels. In other words, the same number of page viewers will tend to scroll halfway or three-quarters through a page, regardless of whether the page size is 5,000 pixels or 10,000 pixels.

+ The top and bottom of a web page are the most valuable areas in terms of visitor attention. Users spend an average of 24 seconds near the top and 14 seconds near the bottom as opposed to 8 seconds at the middle.

If you want to use Clicktale, it costs anywhere from $20 - $100 per month.

View - Clicktale site