Web session recording comes of age

I think I first looked at website session recording or session capture as it's also known  back in 2007 when a company called Speed Trap were in the business of web analytics. It was really a side offering to their main suite of analysis tools that didn't look dissimilar to Google Anayltics does today. Back then it didn't work. It created movie files of a very narrow subset of user sessions that you could, in theory replay at your leisure to highlight user struggle and experience. Looking back it was too far ahead of it's time. Some 8 years later, and having seen a few session recording tool contenders* I've just witnessed what we'd always looked for in such a tool. Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) from Wingify now offers a Session Recorder as part of it's already very agile testing toolkit.

*For balance let me just list the other tools I have used for session recording ;  Tealeaf, Click tale and SessionCam.

With VWO, basically you tell it what page to watch and within minutes (not hours and days) you have a selection of user sessions to replay based on multiple devices and platforms. I was immediately hooked. No jerkiness, no blank screens, no style sheet dropping just a slick, smooth replay of the users every mouse move and click. I've already waxed lyrical about VWOs heat map tool, which integrates nicely with this tool. It's fairly addictive and I found myself replaying 24 sessions in one sitting!!

The payoff?

Having watched those sessions on a checkout page it became obvious we immediately had an issue. Every single visitor without exception was missing a credit card type field and missing the validation messages associated with this. So I fired up VWOs AB testing tool and created an alternative version of the checkout page with this card field in a more obvious place. Immediately we achieved a xx% improvement in sales performance.

Below are screenshots of the session replay in action. The red lines are the mouse moves. The blue bubbles are the left clicks.

Heat maps with Visual Website Optimizer

I love heat maps I really do! These are tools that map where people click and sometimes scroll on a web page, traditionally reflecting a higher heat intensity by colour etc. Trouble is, in the past the tools I've had access to have fallen short of user expectation. Either they simply haven't worked on our content or have been hugely misleading in terms of what they have captured and finally the time lag in gathering data and reporting back.

But no more. When we procured Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) from Wingify as a testing platform back in March of this year, not only did we get a very competent testing platform  it also had a whole set of very useful kit including heatmaps.

So running a split test or MVT test will tell you which experience is best for achieving your online goals but it might not tell you exactly how people are interacting with your test experience. Below is an example of a recent test I've been running on our basket checkout. This personalization test added promo code copy, wrapped around the promo code field entry for people looking for specific holiday dates. As you can see the promo code box and call to action is heavily used at this point in the journey but it also shows people scanning and interacting with the appropriate copy. Conversely heatmaps can obviously show you when people are not interacting with your beloved copy.

Using heat maps in conjunction with testing and conventional analytics really gives you a three dimensional view of exactly what behavior you may or may not be driving.

Heatmap

Heatmap showing fertile and fallow areas of our product pages. People tend to click on only one image within an image set. In this case the 360 degree call to action is an outright winner. 

New company, new job, new kit

I haven't posted for a while and the reason is I've moved jobs in the last few months, moving from finance and banking to the wonderful world or travel and tourism. I am still in the website optimization game but now I get to play with a whole new set of challenges, tests and testing kit.

So, to kick off I've recently procured Visual Website Optimizer for the new company as it's testing platform of choice. I've already got a couple of optimization exercises set-up and I'm already very impressed with this nifty offering.

I'm not going to do a direct comparison between other kit and testing services I've used before. A full listing of testing tools sorted by popularity is available here.

What's impressive about VWO:

• It's affordable, the Enterprise solution doesn't run into 4 or 5 figures per month like some solutions out there. You're not tied into a contract and can flex your usage  upwards & downwards. Flexibility is the key word here.
• At enterprise level you get a plethora of optimisation toolkit to play with; AB testing, Split testing, MVT testing, Heat maps, Click maps, Personalization, Website Reviews, Onsite feedback, AB testing of native iOS apps and more. This is not a stingy offering :)

• Test progress reporting is simple, straight-forward and intuitive. I'd forgotten what it was like to get excited about running a test and wanting to constantly check progress. The summary report acts as a heartbeat for any test you have out there allowing you to dig down for more detail if you need it with the Detailed Reports interface but not overwhelming you with countless filters and segments that end up raising more questions than answers.

I still need to really get under the skin of this tool but so far the price, functionality and customer service has really impressed. I will do a follow-up on this post looking at the personalisation offering in VWO as that looks pretty interesting. Happy testing.