10 December 2009
Free Marketing Tools For Your Website
I recently ran across a couple of great tools for my website that I wanted to pass along to you, my readers. These tools can be beneficial to a internet marketer or used just for fun.
The first is really multiple tools rolled into one. The product is called ClickTale. It’s like no other tool I’ve seen, so I don’t know exactly how to categorize it. I guess I’ll just tell you what it does. Basically, it records what your website’s visitors see. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what it does. In fact, if you’re reading this on my site right now, then I can go back and watch what you did on my site. Scary, isn’t it? If you’re reading my feed then you’re safe…for now. Don’t worry, after all as Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google says, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
I won’t get into technical details of how this system works, but essentially I can see when you scrolled, where you clicked, etc. Of course, I don’t know who you are; I just know what someone did. Watch the video below to get an idea of exactly what I mean. This is an example of a video of one of my visitors that is sped up to 2x normal speed and it skips any time when the mouse is not moving.
(Sorry that the quality is bad, but I tried to keep the video file small, so it would load quickly)
You may wonder exactly why this is useful. I still kind of wonder that myself, but I can see that it does give me a good idea of how long people stick around on an article as well as what path visitors take throughout my site. It probably would give me a good idea of the best placement of advertisements as well.
Another very interesting feature of ClickTale is called Heatmaps. Here is an example:
No, no one put graffiti on my website. This is the heatmap. Where you see dark orange are the most common areas that people move their mouse pointers over, down to light blue being the least. Again, I’m not sure how to use this information yet, but it’s kind of cool to see how people move around the site.
There are many other standard statistics as well that other packages would include, such as visitor demographics, top pages, time on site, etc.
I do see one major downfall in this product – the price. What I have shown you so far is actually absolutely free, but that comes with limitations. For example, when viewing the video of a visitor, you can only view the first two pages that they visit, not their entires session. Another limitation is that it will only record 100 visits per week. These can be overcome by upgrading to a paid plan, but that can be prohibitively expensive. The lowest available plan is $99/month but gives you up to 20,000 recorded pagesviews as well as many other features. Right now, they are actually offering %40 off of their annual plans, so you can get it for around $59 a month. Still too rich for my blood at this point, but maybe in the future when I’m HUGE, I can justify the expense.
Click here if you’d like more information on ClickTale.
The second tool is actually in use in this post. That little video that you saw above was actually created with a free screen capture software called CamStudio. It is very simple to use, quick and effective. After you’ve downloaded (no registration required) the software and installed it, you can get started right away.
Just click the record button, choose the boundaries of your screen that you want to record and it starts recording immediately. When you’re done, click stop and save your file as an .avi file that you can use or edit in another program. It also comes with a .swf converter so that you can post your video online as I have done above. This can be great for computer training as well as just showing off things on your computer. I’ve been told that video really helps attract visitors to articles, though this video was far from exciting.
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