24th November 2006: New Builder package and more...
Given the phenomenal success of the Starter package, and taking
on-board your requests for a new mid-range package, we're very
happy to announce the launch of the new
Builder package.
The new package gives you more "clicks-for-your-buck" than
the Starter package, and also lets you run two A/B Tests
simultaneously. If you still haven't tried out the recently
released A/B Testing suite, this should give you the perfect reason to!
The Builder package is priced at £10 per month, which is --
based on current exchange rates -- equivalent to about US $18.50 or
€14.50.
We've also upgraded the Standard package;
Standard accounts can now record clicks from up to three
websites, rather than just the one.
Along with these package changes, we've also added the facility to
download payment receipts (in PDF format) from your account page, which
are generated automatically.
As if that's not enough, we've also added in even more advanced
support for query strings! The reporting interface has been updated,
so that when you create reports for specific URLs, you can decide
whether or not the query string differentiates different pages or not.
For example, you may have session ids appended to your URLs, and you
want these ignored when producing reports. Alternatively, you may have
a URL such as '/article.php?id=34', where the query string is
important. Either way, you can create the correct reports in
clickdensity.
Please continue to
send
through your suggestions for new features you'd
like to see in clickdensity.
24th October 2006: A/B tests and exporting...
In our continuing effort to make the web a better place, we're very
excited to announce the launch of the new A/B Testing suite in
clickdensity.
This new feature allows you to easily tryout and analyse small changes
to your site, using a subset of your site visitors. Maybe you'd
like to know if a different advert image could produce more
click-throughs? Maybe a change in the wording of a heading would
pique your visitors' interest? Or perhaps you could re-phrase an
inline link to make it more appealing? Use clickdensity A/B tests to
trial and analyse changes like these with ease.
Free trial accounts are limited to a single A/B test during the trial
period. Starter accounts can run a single A/B test any number of times
(i.e. run a test, analyse, run another test, analyse, etc.), and all
other packages can run up to three A/B tests in parallel, per site.
In addition to the new A/B testing suite, we've also added an
'Export' feature to heat and click maps, so that you can save
your reports to disk.
We'll have even more usability-enhancing features soon. In the
meantime, please continue to
send
through your suggestions for what you'd like to
see in clickdensity.
3rd August 2006: announcing the new Starter package...
Last week, we discussed how our existing pricing model was calculated, and
how we were investigating a new low-cost package, to make clickdensity a
viable option for personal sites and smaller organisations.
Well, guess what? Yup - we've come up with a Starter package: £2.50
a month (less than $5 US) – which gives you up to 10,000 clicks at
a time, on any number of pages, and all the usual clickdensity features
(heat maps, click maps, hover maps, IP filtering, …you get the idea). As
with the larger packages, you can even change which site you record clicks
from - any number of times.
We're really excited about this, as you might guess! Ever since we launched,
we've been getting amazing feedback from you about how useful the reports are.
However, it appears that the price barrier has prevented many of you from
adopting the service as a long-term tool. With the new Starter package,
we hope that this barrier has been removed...
We thought that it was important that the monthly price of the Starter package
price was no more than a pint of beer (at least, here in the UK). I don't know
why, but we tend to think of all prices in terms of how much beer we could buy.
Maybe we have a problem.
As usual, we have a large number of other developments up our sleeve (some
small features, and some major features), but let us know if you have any
great ideas, or any problems.
28th July 2006: clickdensity - from the horse's mouth...
We've been up and running now for about 6 weeks, and thought it was about time we started talking
to you more regularly (our therapist recommended it).
So, we'll be using this section to keep you updated with what's happening in the world of clickdensity.
We'll be writing it blog-style - direct from the developers - and hope to give you the ability to
comment and sign-up to RSS in the near future.
What's changed since launch?
Here's a quick run-down of what we've added to clickdensity in the last 6 weeks (we've been busy!):
- HTTPS support
-
In the reporting:
- Home page shortcut
- Reporting Help
- 'Follow Targets', to support regularly changing pages (e.g. blogs, news)
-
'Came From' and 'Went To' filters, which let you display only the clicks from
users who 'came from' or 'went to' a specific page (allowing, for example,
task completion analysis).
- Better support for re-directs
- Better support for iframes
- Navigation buttons
- Transparency slider
- Average Time to Click for each link in the Hover Map report
- Virtual Pages (record clicks from a set of different URLs as the same page)
We've still got a long list of new features to add, which we'll be bringing to you over the weeks
and months ahead. But please, please, please keep on
sending us suggestions
for what you'd like to see – even if we've already got the idea on our list, it will help us prioritise the most
requested features.
While we've got your attention, we'll answer a couple of the most common questions we've been getting:
Isn't this a rip-off of XYZ?
There's at least one other 'heat map' service being built, that some people think "inspired"
us to create clickdensity.
In fact, we (Box UK) have been creating heat-maps for
our clients since November 2005, and
blogged about one set of results
in February 2006. The other heat map services appeared online around the same time
(February/March 2006), so it looks like it is actually down to just coincidence.
Great minds think alike.
We believe that the data visualisation techniques employed by clickdensity are an extremely
powerful means for analysing user experience and behaviour, and having competitors gives us
confidence that we're not alone in our thinking.
From what we've seen of these similar services, there are quite a few differences in
functionality and approach, and there should be room in the market for a few competing systems.
One thing's for sure: this can only be good for you, the consumer; competition drives innovation.
Why are you charging? XYZ is free!
So, this is a different XYZ we're talking about, but you get the idea! There are a number of
services available online that give you a certain level of web analytics for free. Not that
we're trying to compete against plain old web analytics, but there is a certain expectation
that services such as ours should, or could be free.
Developing, maintaining, and (specifically) hosting this kind of service costs many, many
thousands of dollars/pounds/euros every month (and, of course, this cost increases as our
customer base does). The prices are calculated from the amount of resource taken up by each
account (disk space, backup, bandwidth, etc.), and are based on a very large volume of paying
subscribers (what can I say, we're optimistic people!).
We have no plans to pull in thousands of users through unrealistic pricing, then sell-up to
a large corporation. We don't sell your personal details. Nor do we have ulterior motives
(e.g. selling advertising) for getting you to use our service.
We're in this because we believe that we can have a significant impact on the web, through
increasing usability one site at a time. We're going to keep on building on clickdensity -
every week, every month, every year.
However, we do realise that the current pricing model is outside of the budget of personal
sites and small companies. With that in mind, we're investigating how we could offer our
service at a greatly reduced cost, but we haven't found the perfect answer yet. If you have
any ideas on how we could do this,
we'd really love to hear from you.