Mouse Recorder: How You Can See Your Visitors Interacting

Why would you want to record your users’ mouse movements?

A mouse recorder give you a deeper view of user behavior than click-based heatmaps and scrollmaps. As well as knowing what a user clicked on, mouse recordings let you see all their movements on the page before and after.

That leaves you in a better position to guide users to what you want them to do. And like each new layer of real user insight, it comes with surprises.

First-time users of Crazy Egg’s heatmaps and scrollmaps often find that users are clicking on non-clickable assets like images, scrolling past CTAs and focusing their attention in unexpected places.

Recordings let you see real visitor behavior
See where people mouse not just where they click
Learn about visitors’ state of mind and redesign UI to fit

When you add in mouse recordings, you see that users fumble around the page, mouse over assets to see what they do before clicking, and generally deviate from the behavior you’d planned your UX around in all kinds of ways.

There’s another way to do this – get users in a room and literally watch them. But that’s actually more artificial. A self-selecting group that’s not representative of your users, under the gaze of your dev team? That’s not going to show you how people really behave. Users’ best behavior is no good: we need their real behavior.

Of course, once you know, you can rebuild your UX to fit.

In addition to heat maps, Crazy Egg also has a video recording tool so you can literally see, in real time, what people are doing on your site. If you have a sales page or an opt-in page, this can help you identify areas of improvement.

– James Pollard, PersonalFinanceGenius.com

What is a Mouse Recorder?

A mouse recorder is a tool that records mouse movements on a website. So when someone visits your site, a mouse recorder records all their interactions on your site – mouse movements as well as clicks. The gold standard is to do it in real time and produce a video file for you, so you can literally watch a user navigate your site.

What’s The Difference Between a Mouse Recording And Other Visual Analytics Tools?

The big difference between a mouse recorder and a clickmap, scrollmap or heatmap is that those tools only show decisions that have been made. A user decides to scroll down. A user decides to click. But you’re left in the dark about why those users are deciding to do that.

With mouse recordings, you have insight into users’ decision processes. You can see them consider clicking and then mouse away; hover over an asset to see what it does; mouse over your video play button and then decide against it.

How Reliable Is a Mouse Movement Recorder?

In an ideal world mouse movements would correlate perfectly with attention and when a user hovered over an asset, that would mean they were thinking about that asset right then.

In reality, though, things aren’t that simple. Mouse movements don’t precisely correlate with attention.

Some users ‘park’ the mouse while they view the site. Others move the mouse in circles while they think. But while mouse recorders aren’t perfect as an insight into users’ decision-making processes and intentions, they do offer a deeper level of insight than click-based data alone.

And there’s reason to think that they at least offer a reasonably accurate view of where people are looking.

With the caveat that ‘engagement is difficult to measure… and is normally assessed using eye-tracking methods,’ Kelvin Connect and Yahoo Labs argued in 2015 that ’gaze and cursor often correlate, so it may be possible to determine engagement from cursor movements,’

Even more importantly, mouse recordings are recordings – you can see users navigate your site in real time, rather than representing those activities in a static way. That’s much more intuitive to interpret.

How Do Mouse Recordings Work?

Mouse recorders work by recording each mouse movement as an event with a time stamp. Those events are then displayed in sequential order over a view of your page; essentially, mouse recorders take a video of your site, create a video of user interactions, and then replay one over the other.

What Can a Mouse Recorder Do For You?

To put it as simply as possible: mouse recordings can help you get a better website and a better workday.

Mouse recordings can help you improve every stage of the customer journey: cut bounce, increase engagement, boost conversions and enhance retention.

The power to do all this lies in the unique ability of mouse recordings to show you what is actually happening when a real user interacts with your site, in real time. As powerful as heatmaps are, and as valuable as analytics data can be, none of them can do this.

At the same time, mouse recordings let you cut out hours of analysis, poring over reports and sharing inconclusive or tough-to-grasp data. When you’re sharing that data with people from outside marketing you can’t always be sure they’ve understood its implications. But with mouse recordings you can just see it, and show them.

Reduce Bounce

Slashing bounce is tough, because the one thing most bouncing users don’t do is give you anything to work with. They came, they saw, they left. No interactions to measure – all you know about them is they didn’t stick around.

But with mouse recordings you can watch the few seconds (typically fewer than 15 seconds) your bouncing users spend on your site. And you can start to deduce why they bounced, based on their actions on site.

We know that many users bounce because they can’t find what they’re looking for, but what we can’t know is exactly how that applies to an individual website – until we record user sessions on that site.

Then, we have a chance to diagnose and fix bounce based on what bouncing users do on the site.

Since they all but never click anything or otherwise interact with the site, mouse recordings are the only way to capture information about the majority of bouncing users.

Improve Engagement

Once users are sticking around on your site, you have an opportunity to look at what they do and improve engagement based on that.

This is exactly the same kind of approach that you’d use with any other analytics tool, like event tracking or heatmaps. You’re looking for the point where engagement falls off. The difference is that with analytics, you know that users left the site after, say, reading a blog post.

Did they leave the site because they didn’t like the post?

Did they leave because they liked it so much they had everything they needed and no call to stick around?

Or was it nothing to do with the post altogether?

Analytics can’t tell you. Heatmaps can’t show you.

With mouse recordings, you can see users making the decision to disengage and you have some idea of what they were looking at and thinking about when they bailed on you.

That gives you a much more granular, accurate way of optimizing website elements and user flows for engagement.

Improve Conversions

Conversion optimization is the number one use case for heatmaps and other visual analytics tools, because they give you some insight into how the layout of your conversion elements match up with how your users interact with your website.

But there’s a lot that static visual analytics can’t tell you. You know who clicked where, sure. But what about content that’s not even meant to be clicked?

We’ve heard that mouse movement correlates reasonably well with gaze. So if someone mouses along a crucial line of copy, then clicks the button below it, was the reason the copy, or the button?

What if you have an infographic on your landing page, showing how your offering works? A user who mouses their way through it before clicking through has validated the graphic, not the button!

The opposite is also true – recordings will let you see users who went to the button, hovered over it, then decided not to click.

Can you fix that by making the button bigger? Probably not.

They found it, and it’s not like people don’t know what a button is. The reason might lie with the content of the page just before the button – or with the button copy itself.

Again, only by watching real users in real time can you gain this level of insight.

Improve Retention

Mouse recordings can help you improve customer retention too.

Just like a website’s FAQs are often its least appreciated asset, so the customer who uses the knowledge base gets less attention than the visitor who uses the landing page.

Yet, over time, that returning customer looking to troubleshoot, leverage the product in new ways, or seeking expanded functionality through integrations, can have a business value many times that of the first-time visitor hovering over the ‘free trial’ button.

Recordings can show you how existing users interact with the site. You can see mouse movements as users try to find the answer to their query in your FAQs, or follow a user mousing along a complex sentence, paying it special attention as they struggle to understand it. (Hint: rewrite it!)

Watching users navigate a section of the site where the aim isn’t to get them to click anything is tough.

A heatmap can’t show it; a scroll map will show scrolling – but what if they left your KB page early because it’s so good it answered their question in the first few lines?

To make data-driven decisions on areas of the site where clicks aren’t the target, you need a tool that doesn’t rely on clicks for measurement.

Back Up Your Ideas

Finally, recordings can get you buy-in from managers, bosses and clients. Ever patiently explain the reason a site is underperforming, or recommend a change, and just get stonewalled?

It’s frustrating – but you can’t blame people for wanting proof. With mouse recordings, you can just show them! It’s hard to argue with a movie of a real user.

5 Reasons Why You Should Use Mouse Recording

1: To get the best A/B tests you’ve ever run

A/B tests are the foundation of a data-driven marketing strategy. Many great marketers recommend running A/B tests constantly, and the results are almost guaranteed to be counterintuitive.

(Source: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-interesting-and-counter-intuitive-results-you-have-seen-from-an-A-B-test)

Sounds like we’d like to have the best A/B tests we can.

How do we get them?

Test design and setup can get specialized. Basically, though, A/B tests work like this:

(Source: https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/guides/ab-test-planning/)

Setting a basic test up is simple. In most A/B tests the data comes from analytics tools like Google Analytics, or from visualization tools like heatmaps and scrollmaps.

But as we’ve seen, these can be flawed. You can get two key pieces of knowledge from an A/B test:

1: Which version performs better

2: What it is about that version that makes it perform better

Sometimes this can be intuited from analytics alone. In the example that Ramit gives above, where he cut his friend’s sales page in half and conversions fell 50%, the change is so big and so clearly linked to a single variable that it’s obvious.

Sometimes scrollmapping flags it up: we know that page A converted better than page B because no-one scrolled down page B far enough to even see the button.

The key point is that these tests tick both boxes. They both tell you which version you should use now, and give you rules of thumb to follow for the future (longform pages with a button at the top).

But some A/B tests don’t deliver on point 2. They’re too vague, or even if it’s clear which version is best, there’s no way to tell why.

A/B test those pages with mouse recordings, though, and you can watch users in the moments leading up to the clickthrough or bounce and see where they were looking and to some extent, even what they were thinking.

If they’re getting to the bottom of the page, mousing around vaguely, then bouncing, can they find the button?

If they’re getting to the bottom off the page, following the CTA text with the mouse (more common than you’d think) and then bouncing, maybe the button is fine but the copy needs work.

Point is, using mouse recordings massively increases the chance that your A/B test will both tell you clearly which version of an asset is better, and let you clearly see why, making A/B test both more intuitive and quicker to conduct, and vastly more productive.

2. To Drive Ecommerce Sales

Social shopping website Blue Kangaroo used mouse recording application Inspectlet to drive ecommerce sales.

Blue Kangaroo works in a way that Pinterest users would find familiar -for instance, letting users build collections of their favorite products.

At the same time, it has features similar to eBay, like being able to put products on a ‘watch’ list. Generating more sales was a priority for product director Anthony Ford.

And traditional data analysis and visualization tools weren’t up to the job.

What was needed was a tool that would show how users worked around the glitches and rough spots in Blue Kangaroo’s user flows.

Mouse Recorder: How You Can See Your Visitors Interacting