Both Clickscapes and the IntelliContact email newsletter service itself are the result of the innovative team at Preation. Founded in 1997, Preation serves the website needs of over 300 clients with web design, web development, and web marketing services.

PREATION INTRODUCES CLICKSCAPES AT TECH 2006

Thank you for visiting the Preation booth at CED's Tech 2006 Conference. We hope you had the chance to learn about how our new product Clickscapes is helping web marketers make informed decisions through visual user behavior heatmaps. While at our booth, you played the Web Marketing Game, or expressed interest in being emailed the results.

The following website screenshot shows the fourteen red circles that were offered as selections for the element most clicked by visitors within their first 30 seconds on the IntelliContact homepage.

Each red circle represented a unique element competing to capture the attention and interest of visitors to the website. Elements one through seven represented standard site navigation options while elements eight, nine, ten, and fourteen were direct calls to action. Elements eleven and thirteen were not links at all but were words within the body text which represented the company's brand name "IntelliContact" and its industry "emarketing" respectively while element twelve was truly unique and displayed a play button to start a video.

By paying special attention to the color, sizing, placement, and style of each element you will see how IntelliContact attempts to direct their online visitors down the path they prefer. With the repetition of the call to action "Try it Free" in multiple arrangements it is clearly their intended focus. The page in its entirety provides ten different ways to reach the free trial signup form, five of which are provided within our fourteen highlighted elements. With this intentional focus one might expect that elements seven, eight, nine, ten, and fourteen would together receive the majority of user clicks on this page. Clickscapes will tell you that another single element on this page receives nearly six times as many clicks as all of these elements combined.

For a period of twenty four hours during the business week prior to CED's Tech 2006 Conference, Clickscapes collected user click data for the entire www.intellicontact.com domain. Over seven thousand clicks were tracked and recorded. Of these clicks 3,351 were for the homepage.

In order to focus the click data we used the Clickscapes report filtering feature to remove two types of clicks:

1) Clicks on form fields: this effectively limits the data to visitors without IntelliContact accounts (because IntelliContact customers use the 'Username,' 'Password,' and 'Login' form fields at the top of the page to log in to their accounts), and

2) Clicks made after 30 seconds on the page: in order to focus on design driven click decisions we removed clicks from users that spent more than half of a minute reading or reviewing the body content before making the decision where to click.

This resulted in a click data set of 303 user click points representing the actions of new website visitors (without IntelliContact accounts) making a quick decision (less than 30 seconds) of where to click based on the design and layout of elements on the page.

The following Clickscapes user behavior heatmap shows the results visually:

Element number three, the 'Pricing' option within the main navigational menu, clearly takes the top position with its brightly intense yellow and green heat highlighting.

Clickscapes also provides supporting numerical metrics which allow us to learn the exact number and percentage of clicks received by each element. The results for each of the fourteen elements offered as options within this game are as follows (in descending order by number of clicks received):

* The percentage number of clicks per element in the figure above do not total to 100% because the fourteen elements represented in the game were only a sample of all elements receiving clicks on the page. In fact, Clickscapes reported a total of 83 elements receiving at least one click within the original unfiltered 3,351 click point set.

Looking back at the intentions of the design, it's interesting to see that the call to action 'free trial' elements seven, eight, nine, ten, and fourteen received a total of only 11 clicks.

* The percentage number of clicks per element in the figure above do not total to 100% because the fourteen elements represented in the game were only a sample of all elements receiving clicks on the page. In fact, Clickscapes reported a total of 83 elements receiving at least one click within the original unfiltered 3,351 click point set.

The metrics are useful here to support the clear visual distinction between element three and elements seven through ten and fourteen as displayed by the visual heatmap. Although, the most important differences are immediately visible using the visual heatmap alone. The top three most-clicked elements are easily identifiable as the navigational link for pricing, the introductory body paragraph, and the navigational link for features.

By using Clickscapes, IntelliContact effectively completed a website user focus group including a representative sample of real online visitors without the time and expense involved in an actual on-location group meeting. In concept, Clickscapes allowed IntelliContact to ask their users "where would you click on our homepage?" and "how much time would you spend reading the site before clicking?" and receive their most honest answers from within their normal web browsing environment, without the inaccuracies inherent to actually putting people on the spot and directly asking those very questions. Using Clickscapes, IntelliContact received critical insight into real user behavior without incurring the cost and inaccuracies inherent to traditional analytics and surveying methods.

Although the real winner here is of course IntelliContact, the six of you that guessed correctly have each won a free Clickscapes 10,000 click account ($90 value). The fact that a large number of guesses (nearly 44%) were for one of the free trial 'call to action' elements seems to suggest that external best guesses, provided outside of the standard web browsing environment, may match more closely to marketing goals than real visitor behavior.

THE WINNERS OF THE WEB MARKETING GAME ARE:

• Lister Delgado (NC IDEA)
• Ian Hoppes (Medcryption)
• Craig Stone (Hire Networks)
• Tim Ammons
• Joey Costa (The Tek, LLC)
• Russ King (InfoStrength)

Thank you for playing the Web Marketing Game. Although this was only a game to those of you who played, web marketing experts across the globe are faced with making similar guesses every day, with one exception, they're launching new products online, managing high-dollar web marketing budgets, or adjusting content on a highly trafficked homepage… making important decisions with real consequences without an inherent understanding of their online audience or a way to see the effects they're causing. Common web analytics tools either neglect to provide the numbers they need or don't provide visual insight into real visitor behavior.

Today's lucky winners along with other Clickscapes customers are now able to make insightful web marketing decisions with Clickscapes and visual user behavior heatmaps. With accounts starting at just $9.00/month during this introductory period there may never be a better time to get started. To learn more about Clickscapes or to open an account for your organization, please visit us online at www.clickscapes.com or contact a Preation web strategist at 919-459-1392.

Both Clickscapes and the IntelliContact email newsletter service itself are the result of the innovative team at Preation. Founded in 1997, Preation serves the website needs of over 300 clients with web design, web development, and web marketing services. Preation brings industry best practices, cutting edge web based technology solutions, and a corporate culture of innovation to each unique client and project. More information on Preation can be found online at www.preation.com or by calling 919-459-1392.