What do you use Smartlook for?
We use Smartlook recordings and heatmaps to better understand the behaviors of the visitors of our clients’ webshops and websites, and we also use it for CRO. In other words, Smartlook helps us track whether visitors follow expected conversion paths or not. In cases where visitors drop out of the conversion funnel at any point, we start looking at Smartlook recordings to see why they leave. We then optimize the funnel and increase our client’s conversion rate based on this insight.
Which teams in your company use Smartlook?
The UX team, which consists of me and one other colleague. Also, the SEO team occasionally uses Smartlook to check navigation menus in our clients’ webshops.
What problem does Smartlook help you solve?
The main obstacle of a digital agency is understanding the behaviors of visitors of our clients’ e-commerce stores. In a digital space, you can’t physically see the visitor and their behavior the way you can in a brick-and-mortar store. Smartlook enables you to do exactly that — see your visitor’s behavior as if they were in a physical store.
The combination of recordings, event tracking, and conversion funnels that Smartlook plans to launch will also save me a fair amount of time that I now have to spend switching between various systems. I would summarize it like this in terms of user behavior: Google Analytics tells us where the problem is, heatmaps show us what the problem is, and recordings reveal why the problem is happening.
How did you deal with this issue before?
Before user recording technology came around, there basically wasn’t a way for UX specialists to see what exactly visitors were doing on a website, so it was difficult to understand their behaviors. You were just guessing. The suggested solutions were basically subjective opinions of UX consultants or IT guys sitting at a table with no tangible data to support them.
Can you quantify how Smartlook helps you?
At the end of each project for a client, we send them a report with a summary of work done, goals reached, and suggestions for what to improve. Insights from Smartlook alone usually give us around 10 webshop improvement suggestions for each client, which we will put in our report.
What made you choose Smartlook over other analytics solutions?
I was looking on the web for new heatmap products to stay up to date with the latest online UX tools. I stumbled upon Smartlook and found out it can actually do more things, like recordings. Plus, the plans to launch event tracking and funnels are great. Smartlook was easy to use and more affordable than other solutions, so I started to use it on the websites of several new clients, and so far it looks like we’ll stick with it. I especially like the option to show historical data in heatmaps. This way, I create heatmaps already filled with data and don’t have to wait.
