ClickTale

It’s amazing how quickly Clicktale tracks customer website navigation, analyzes the data, and provides several choices for visually representing customer behavior and intention. I’m especially interested in Clicktale’s ability to perform individual customer AND group behavioral analysis. It could be invaluable for me; mainly because it would help me identify outlier behavior from the early stages of a group trend within my customer base; a critical factor since my business deals in specialized vs. commodity products.

I experienced profound cognitive dissonance when I listen to Clicktale’s “human-focused” approach to digital customer monitoring and site analytics. Granted, they very well may believe that every human being is unique; with their own set of intentions; but the reality is that analytics are based on cold hard numbers, established motivational theories, and algorithms with pre-set criteria (by humans), tolerance thresholds, and proven statistical models for decision-making. Clicktale’s persuasive, warm and fuzzy video stating something like, “... if a business can gain insight into the unique, personal intentions of their customers, it will be more capable to satisfy their needs, identify trends early on, attract new customers, and confidently prepare for business scenarios that are more likely to happen than others (translated: based on probability theory and current input, this scenario is “statistically” more likely to happen). My take on all this? In business dealings, I would rather be convinced with fact, than persuaded by attempts to evoke an emotional response. Call me cynical...because I am.

Clicktale analyzes navigational pauses, stopping points, duration of stay, departure destinations, subsequent returns, etc., interprets the data via their “group of specialists’ and proprietary comparison process to accepted benchmarks; then generates summarizing data and graphs “intended to indicate customer intention”. I just can’t leave here without expressing this thought that’s been screaming to escape my mind since I began this article. I’m referring to that famous adage about the nature of online behavior, first captioned in a cartoon by Peter Steiner and later published in The New Yorker on the 5th of July, 1993, “On the internet, nobody know’s you’re a dog.” I wonder how Clicktale would interpret the customer intentions of the website navigational behavior of my cat or my next door neighbor’s 2 year old?