Contentsquare vs. HitsLink

It is well suited to businesses with a full time web analyst that will be using the tools to create actionable reports that drive action in the company. It is less appropriate where companies are just looking for some new tools and it will be forgotten soon after implementation. If a website is critical to your business and you have dedicated resources or consultants to help you understand the data, then it is invaluable. I love it.

If you're looking for a comprehensive, user-friendly web analytics tool, you should definitely consider Hitslink. Before you subscribe to the software, take a test run on their Demo version of the site, as it behaves exactly like the full professional version. The biggest disadvantage is that Google+ registered users' search engine traffic data will be mostly (if not completely) blocked. However, this drawback is rarely a significant hindrance to analyzing your website's traffic, but it is something to be aware of.

• The qualitative aspects of user experience are very well captured by ClickTale. We can get solid actionable insights through the various dashboards which track mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, etc.
• The visual conversion funnels give a very good high level view of landing page performance and how they work together.
• The video recordings are especially helpful. The user behavior captured is especially helpful in making decisions about user interface - form fields, call to actions, etc.

• View website traffic stats and trends in user-friendly charts, graphs, and lists.
• Easily parses out website users by search engine, search term, geographic location, referral website, and other specific characteristics.
• Shows which websites users are coming from, what pages on your site they've landed on and which ones they leave your site from.
• Gives statistics on how long users are viewing specific pages, which allows for the analyzing of the effectiveness of each webpage on a website.
• Easily view real-time as well as long-term traffic statistics

• Looking at isolated recordings without creating a segment, we still have to use the old interface
• User interface has been massively improved but there are a few nags here and there that still need to be addressed
• Mobile and desktop should be shown side by side and not separately

Incentivized

• Specific information such as search term and geographic location is blocked for users coming into your site through Google who are also signed into a Google+ account, making it increasingly more difficult to analyze trends as more and more people acquire Google+ accounts. This is part of Google's strategy to make companies pay them directly through their Google Analytics software, and it is working against services like Hitslink.

For small companies with limited user testing budgets, ClickTale serves as a useful user testing tool. When I cannot get the funds for in depth user testing, I always know that I have a baseline of information I can rely on

Hitslink is as useful as it is user-friendly. I haven't seen another website analytics tool as comprehensive and at the same time straightforward as this service. The only downside of Hitslink is Google's blocking of information from its registered Google+ users to the software. As Google+ continues to reign in more of the population, I can see this being a significant problem for Hitslink to overcome. However, there is still a vast majority of search engine users whose actions are visible through Hitslink, and as long as this stays the case, the service will be an invaluable tool for website administrators.

I had some issues interacting with viewing recordings of a specific page by many users but my impression was that this was going to be fixed.

The service is incredibly intuitive and very easy to learn. The only drawback is not having a mobile-optimized website to easily view website reports on the go. But on a PC or Mac, Hitslink is as user friendly as it gets. I have yet to see a navigation system on any SaaS website that makes a service that is this comprehensive seem so straight-forward.

ContentSquare [(Clicktale)] is going deeper on UX understanding than traditional web analytics tools. You can truly understand how a page is used (where users click or even miss click, on which part of the page they are spending most of their time, if some links are clicked but bad positioned on the page...), and that's a thing you can't really measure trough a traditional web analytics tool.

Incentivized

• I learned how effective some of our image carousels were. How only 10% of a page visitors were being exposed to only the first slide. People were scrolling down or leaving the page without ever being exposed to 90% of the content. Once I provided this input to stakeholders it was an easy sell to redesign this aspect of the page.
• I used the mouse-move heat map to analyze user interaction with the footer. Showing stakeholders the before and after redesign heat maps did wonders for improving my credibility as an usability analyst.
• We used Clicktale to help analyze our 404 error page effectiveness. Our redesign gave us a 14% lower bounce rate on our redesigned 404 error page. Stakeholders appreciated a quantitative measure to gauge the success of that project.

• Faster lead conversion
• Improvement of the effectiveness of landing pages (and all webpages on our sites for that matter)
• Increased employee efficiency by allowing us to make targeted changes to webpages in real time