Give your customers what they want, and they’ll keep on coming back. It's a theory we all believe in, and one as old as the service industry itself. We all know we should be building “customer-centric” businesses and “customerfocused” websites, but how many of us are able to base our online decisions on actual customer experiences, and how much today is guesswork?

1. Best
Free & Paid
Website Optimization Tools
The 2012 Buyer’s Guide

2. Know thy customer
Give your customers what they want, and they’ll keep on coming back. It's a theory we all believe in, and one as old
as the service industry itself. We all know we should be building “customer-centric” businesses and “customer-
focused” websites, but how many of us are able to base our online decisions on actual customer experiences, and
how much today is guesswork?
The user-testing spectrum
Unfortunately, there is still no golden bullet, no one tool that does it all. Marketers today are stuck in a catch 22 of
having to choose between in-depth qualitative feedback solutions and statistically heavy quantitative tools. While
one dives in to all the details but only a small sample of users, the other is able to analyze hundreds of millions of
website visitors, but only offer basic analytics. The good news is that this spectrum offers more than simply two
extremes. If companies take advantage of tools available at each level of the spectrum, they will have a much more
complete understanding of their website needs and goals.

3. How to use this guide
In this guide, we’ll be introducing the full gamut of web solutions, starting with tools that evaluate your entire site traffic, and ending with
techniques and best practices for understanding the individual user. At each step of the spectrum, we've handpicked the best free and paid
tools that you should be using. Generally, the free tools will offer enough basic functionality for small businesses and individuals who need
great feedback at a low budget. The paid tools on the other hand, offer advanced features and functionality vital for large businesses and
enterprises, and are definitely worth the money if you can afford it.
aditional Web Analytics
Customer Experience Analytics
Customer Feedback
Concept TestTraditional User TestingTraditional Web Analytics
Customer Feedbac
Concept Testin

4. Traditional Web Analytics
Sample Size: Quantitative score: Qualitative Score:Billions 5 1
These tools were built with one goal in mind – Numbers. Essentially an evolution of the old “hit-counters” you saw on websites in the 1990s,
these tools tell you how many people came to your site, where they’re from, and what pages they looked at. This qualitative information is the
first, basic step to understanding your customers.
Best Free Tool
www.google.com/analytics
The family minivan of the web analytics world, Google®
Analytics
is free, easy to setup and a breeze to use. It can do lots of the
more complicated stuff as well, and there's a great community of
users and experts out there to help you along the way. It stays
free as long as you have less than 10 million hits a month, and if
you exceed this limit, you should be looking at a full-page solution
anyway!
Best Paid Tools
www.omniture.com www.webtrends.com
If Google®
Analytics is the family minivan, these guys are the
Ferrari and Lamborghini. Incredibly powerful but much more
expensive, these are the tools used by the world's biggest websites
to let them know exactly how their sites are performing. In general,
Adobe®
is better for marketing based analytics, while Webtrends®
goes for the more modern approach with the addition of mobile and
social analytics.
$10K
+
Analytics
Free $8K
+

5. Customer Experience Analytics
Sample Size: Quantitative score: Qualitative Score:Millions 4 2
Hoping to give qualitative insights but still maintain the scale of traditional web analytics, Customer Experience Analytics offers a deeper look
into the customer’s actual behavior on the website itself, what their motives were for coming to the website, and what they experienced while on
the website itself.
Best Free Tool
www.clicktale.com
By recording every mouse move, click, scroll and anonymous
keystrokes, ClickTale®
is able to create playable videos of your
customers actually browsing your websites, and lets you search for
the videos you care about the most. It also gives a more
quantitative view of these interactions with heatmaps and other
aggregated reports that show you what your website visitors are
doing en mass.
Best Paid Tools
www.clicktale.com
Built on the same recorder technology, but scaled to support the
world’s largest websites, ClickTale®
Enterprise boasts a whole
range of features not found in the free plan. These additions, such
as segmentation, behavioral drill down, 3rd
party integrations and
Ultra-Scale reporting make a massive difference in the quality of
information gathered and significance of the findings when looking
at datasets of tens, if not hundreds of millions of customers.
Free
$5K+ENTERPRISE

6. Customer Feedback
Sample Size: Quantitative score: Qualitative Score:Thousands 3 3
These are the first tools on our list that require active user participation, by asking visitors to answer some questions or fill in a form. By its very
nature, this is going to encourage a response from those customers who are particularly satisfied with your website, dissatisfied or simply have
too much free time on their hands. It is still, however, the best way to collect in-depth user feedback on a grand scale.
Best Free Tool
www.4qsurvey.com
Developed by Google®
Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik, 4Q
Survey essentially asks your website visitors to answer simple
questions: How would you rate your site experience? What was
the purpose of your visit? Were you able to fulfill that purpose?
And if not, why not? It's incredible the insight you'll get from asking
these questions alone, and how having a set of fixed focus
questions actually improves the quality of the feedback you get
from your customers. They hide their free plan quite well, but you
can find it at http://bit.ly/O0FpW4.
Best Paid Tool
www.opinionlab.com
What started off as completely customizable website feedback
forms has now grown into something much bigger. OpinionLab’s
mobile feedback, in-store feedback and product feedback make it
seem as if you are able to collect feedback on anything, at any
time or any place.
Free
$2K+

7. Concept Testing
Sample Size: Quantitative score: Qualitative Score:Hundreds 2 4
Now that we’re moving into the realm of focus groups, you have to remember that while you may not always be dealing with a group of people
who represent your customers, the feedback you are going to get is going to be much more in-depth.
Best Free Tool
www.conceptfeedback.com
You can upload any image, web design concept, or live page, and
a massive community from experts to idiots will let you know
exactly what they think of it. The feedback is great, and will usually
pick up on details you never would have thought to look for. The
catch? You have to give feedback on five other concepts before
uploading five yourself, which we think could only make you better
at your job in the long run.
Best Paid Tool
www.fivesecondtest.com
Based on the theory that we judge a website in the first couple of
seconds of landing on a page, this service lets you pay for
hundreds of testers to give you their first impressions of your
website or mock-up. With loads of custom functionality and more
advanced features than you could imagine, you get a lot more
bang for your buck here. However, like our other paid tools, it
takes a little bit more of a commitment from you, both in terms of
time and money.
Free
$100

8. Traditional User Testing
Sample Size: Quantitative score: Qualitative Score:Tens 1 5
Finally, we hit pure qualitative feedback, with no focus on quantitative results whatsoever. By literally sitting down with your website visitors,
asking them questions, and getting them to talk to you, you get 100% transparency into the mind of your customers, one customer at a time.
Best Free Tool
Heuristic Evaluations
Your office, home or local coffee shop
Yes, it sounds scary. But all Heuristic Evaluations mean is asking
people what they think about your website. It's the oldest and
simplest trick in the usability handbook, and from experience, it
works! After watching two or three of your friends, colleagues and
relatives fail to see the big, fat call to action on your landing page,
things begin to fall into place very quickly and it’s a great way to
understand exactly what is, and isn’t happening on your website.
Best Paid Tool
Usability Labs
Many, based on location
These are the be all and end all of usability tools, and there are
hundreds of labs all over the world offering in-depth user testing.
Different processes involve one-way mirrors, web cams, even eye
tracking devices, and can take up to a week to drain a handful of
participants of absolutely everything they think about your website,
as well as run hundreds of mock tasks and usability tests.
Free
$10K+

9. About ClickTale
ClickTale is the leader in Customer Experience Analytics, the next advance in web analytics, optimizing usability and maximizing conversion
rates of any website. Its patented Customer Experience Visualization™ technology allows ebusinesses to see their customers’ true-to-life
online experience at all levels of detail, from aggregated views to playable videos of users’ browsing sessions. Unlike traditional analytics
platforms that assess page-to-page navigation, ClickTale reveals the customer experience inside the page. ClickTale, an enterprise-class SaaS
solution, is fast to deploy and provides immediate ROI. Serving over 2,000 customers worldwide including Fortune 500 ebusinesses, ClickTale
is the fastest growing company in its space.
To learn more, see: www.clicktale.com
© 2012