What if you could borrow someone’s eyes for some time? Okay, that wasn’t meant to be a joke; it was actually a pretty serious question. Let us put it this way – what if you could see what someone else saw on a website. And by see here we mean actually “seeing” the exact parts of a website’s display that caught a user’s eye during his visit. Wouldn’t it be just the thing a website owner needed?

An online marketer, web designer, or an online business owner always needs to know if his website is actually achieving its purpose – drawing customers in and driving sales. While there are various tools to track how much time a user spends on a web-page before going away, knowing exactly what the user “sees” on a page is rather difficult. Of course if the user ends up filling some form you’d know what he saw for sure, but if it was just another content filled website, finding out the exact points on your website that attracted the customer’s attention could give you valuable insights.

That’s exactly what the tool we’re discussing here does – show you what your customers actually see on your website. With RealEye, you can view your website through your customers’ eyes.

RealEye – Online eye tracking for websites

RealEye is a unique SaaS platform that lets you track your website visitors’ eye movements through webcam tracking. It records visual activity of visitors on websites (landing pages, posters, flyers, etc.) and returns results in the form of playable heat-maps of single and aggregated results. So when you view the results, you can know the exact spot of your website a user focused most on (since it will contain the most concentrated heat-map).

Eye-tracking brings great value to a project’s development lifecycle. You can run tests on your design and spot weaknesses like users not noticing CTA, slogan or branding even before you release the product. The tool is powered by advanced eye-tracking algorithms that allow you to track what people see within ~64px (the size of a button).

Here’s a quick glance at the tool’s features:

• Supports adding image files or website URLs for eye-tracking
• Lets you add up to 20 projects into a single analysis
• Enables you to get results from about 20 testers within 8 hours
• Allows you to invite your own testers with no additional fee
• Provides access to shareable dashboards with results presented on playable heat-map
• Very low error margin on visual angle of 4.17 degree

In a nutshell, RealEye lets you know whether your website’s CTA is being noticed or not!

How it works

The logic and working behind the tool is quite simple.

• You add projects (design images or URLs) to the tool’s online interface and run the analysis.
• The tool’s on-call testers then view your project data with eye-tracking on
• You get to see the results within a span of 8 hours.

Why 8 hours? Because RealEye uses real testers from its internal team to run eye-tracking analysis on your projects and they might or might not be available when you start the analysis. But you can be assured of receiving the results of your tests within a maximum period of 8 hours. That’s why the demo of the tool is called “instant demo” since don’t need to wait around for the results; you can see them within a few minutes (primarily because you play the part of the viewer).

A cool feature of the tool lets you invite your own testers and use them with eye-tracking instead of relying on RealEye’s testers. This aspect of the tool can be particularly helpful if the images or URLs that you need to test contain sensitive material.

Once you’re able to see the heat-maps, you can click and drag your mouse to highlight a particular area of the maps to see exactly how much time the tester spent looking at that area. This feature when performed on end users helps you identify the most attractive points of your design or URL and thus help you identify:

• The most important element on the page
• If you’re users are reading your content
• Visibility of elements below fold
• Distractions by useless elements

Highs & Lows

The plus points of the tool are obvious – its unique functionality and purpose. The motto behind the application’s development is to empower people to find out real plus and minus points about their design, and that’s exactly what RealEye allows you to do.

A major drawback (if you can call it that) of the tool is that there’s no trial version available for it. All you get to try the tool out is an “instant demo” that lasts a couple of minutes and lets you see the action. To test out the tool on any sample URL or image you’ll need to sign up.

• Track what your website visitors see with realeye.io/, webcam eye-tracking for web designers via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

RealEye lets you take control of things and its results are surprisingly accurate. The platform has helped many designers understand what their audience looks at and thus improve their work. It would be great if the tool had some sort of a trial version, however, even without it, there’s probably no reason why web designers shouldn’t be using it.

Convinced you’ve built a great website but aren’t sure why the bounce rate keeps rising? Put attractive options and deals you can on your webpage but still can’t crack your target sales? The problem might very well lie with the design of your website or the information you provide. But how will you get to know what’s wrong? Who should you consult to highlight what you’re missing out?

How about letting the customers show you themselves?

What we’re getting at is that there are tools available online that let you monitor customer behavior by letting you either view their browsing patterns directly or record whatever they do on your website and review it later to gather insights. That way you get to know what customers like or dislike on your webpage and make improvements to achieve your targets better.

Interested yet?

SmartLook – Record customer activity on your website

SmartLook is a smart online tool that lets you record everything visitors do on your website, for free. It records screens of real users as they visit your website so that you can see what visitors clicked, what data they filled into forms, which pages they spend most of their time on, and how they browse through each of your website’s sections. This way, SmartLook can help you identify user experience problems, the reason behind increase in bounce rates, and key attractive areas that convinced users to make purchases.

And if you’re wondering it would require you to install some kind of browser extension or plug-in to activate, well it doesn’t. SmartLook integrates seamlessly with some of the most well known website building platforms including WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal, Shopify, Google Tag Manager, and many more.

Here’s a look at the tool’s best features:

• Record user behavior as videos and them instantly to reveal improvement points
• Maintain all recordings of a particular visitor at one place
• Generate click, move, and heatmaps from the recordings to watch where your visitors click and how far they scroll down the page
• Find important visitors using filters
• Share links of user recordings with your UX designers or developers so that everyone can spot issues
• Link multiple websites with a single SmartLook account
• Categorize recording using tags
• Use tool APIs to link customer’s name, email or other info from your system

Additionally, SmartLook also lets you record visitor activity from mobiles and tablets. The tool is flexible enough to let you adjust recordings as per your needs using APIs.

Use SmartLook like this

To start using the tool, visit its website and click on the big green button in the center of the screen that says “Get Started – Free Forever” or click on “Get Started Now” in the upper right corner of the screen. You’ll be directed to a signup page where all you need to provide is your email id and create a password. Thereafter, click on “Let’s take a look”.

After a couple of seconds you’ll reach your dashboard. Okay you need to pay attention to a little catch here. By default, the email id that you provide during signup will be taken as your website name. This setting is kind of strange but anyways. Click on “Switch website” to enter the URL of your website on which you wish to record user activity. You’ll see some options to edit and then delete site. Once we deleted the email id, we clicked on “Add site” to provide our website’s URL.

Once the website was added, we clicked on “Tracking code” to view the snippet we needed to place on our website. The instructions regarding where to place the code were also given there. We placed the code at the appropriate place in our website’s page and waited for a couple of minutes. Thereafter, to test out if the tool worked, we opened up a browser window and visited the pages where we’d placed the tracking code.

The recording didn’t show up instantly, but after about a minute, it was listed with complete information about our browsing environment, date and time of visit. We could view the recording just as it had happened. The tool even informed us that “the visitor is still on your website” for the time we hadn’t closed the window where we were browsing our website.

So yes, SmartLook works, and it works well. But you’ll have to be a little patient and allow it to get updated with the latest results.

Pros VS Cons

The benefits of the tool are obvious. As far as the downsides are concerned, when we tested its working on a mobile device, the recordings didn’t show up for almost 3 minutes after we’d started browsing. We tried filtering the tool to pick up recordings only for mobile devices but still nothing. As we were about to pen it down as a con, the recordings showed up. The browsing activity on the mobile device was also recorded with all information of the environment and time and duration of visit.

And considering we didn’t need to give any credit card information for all this and neither were we asked to register, the free tool came off as pretty cool!

• See your website through your visitors’ eyes with smartlook.com/ @getSmartlook via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

There is a pricing model for the tool that allows you to access premium features, but for most purposes, the free account should suffice. All in all, double thumbs up to SmartLook from our end.