With nearly 17 million users, CricHeroes is the world’s largest cricket network. Originally a scorekeeping app for grassroots cricketers, it has evolved into a social sports network relying on performance analytics to improve how members play, watch, and understand cricket.

With CricHeroes, you can do the following:

• Score, analyze, and discuss cricket matches
• Receive detailed insights to improve individual player and team performance
• Find teams to join, tournaments, grounds, umpires, and more
• Register and manage your own tournaments

Smartlook features used

Session Recordings

Watch authentic video recordings of user behavior on your website. Replay sessions and segment recordings to focus on important user groups.

Events

Track all clicks and interactions across your website. Identify the most crucial events and browse session recordings to explore user interactions in-depth.rn

CricHeroes was looking for precise data regarding how their app is used so they can help improve user engagement and retention rates

CricHeroes wanted to continually improve their app’s features to grow their user base and ensure their customers were getting the best experience possible. The problem was they didn’t have access to data that allowed them to visualize how the user journey unfolded, including where users misclicked and got stuck. Without this data, CricHeroes couldn’t make informed decisions about how to upgrade their app’s features or develop new ones. 

To solve the problem, CricHeroes implemented a behavior analytics tool to generate the data and insights they needed. Specifically, they wanted:

• A step-by-step understanding of how people use their app
• To encourage behavior linked to higher user engagement and retention
• Identify points where users stop engaging and mitigate them
• Identify points of strong user engagement and amplify them

“If we can give users the value they are searching for in week one, they’re more likely to keep using the app. So, although onboarding is very important, it’s difficult as we have different user personas. So we needed to know which activities users were doing right after signing up. Based on that, we can improve our onboarding to retain more users.”

Parita Pithwa

User Engagement Lead at CricHeroes

Smartlook is a flexible, affordable way for CricHeroes to analyze user behavior

CricHeroes chose Smartlook as it includes the behavior analytics features they wanted at a competitive price. 

Once Smartlook was implemented, the CricHeroes team was immediately able to access and explore insights into the user journey.  

CricHeroes improves and streamlines the user experience with data and insights from Smartlook

CricHeroes’ product growth team uses session recordings and events to streamline and improve the user journey. Now they have access to precise, real-life data regarding how users interact with their app. With this, they can adjust existing features and develop new ones to optimize the user experience. 

This includes improving the onboarding experience, removing unnecessary features, and encouraging user behavior (such as direct messaging) which leads to stronger engagement and retention. 

Boosting direct messaging by 11% by giving relevant nudges

Direct messaging is one of the app’s core engagement features. CricHeroes uses automated nudging to encourage users to exchange messages with one another. 

By analyzing session recordings, they successfully identified new points along the user journey where users are likely to contact other users. After adding extra nudges at these points, users sent 11% more messages.

Improving the onboarding experience to optimize user retention 

Now, CricHeroes is no longer in the dark about what users do after signing up. By pulling up data on specific events — such as viewing scorecards, creating teams, and visiting leaderboards — the CricHeroes team can view all relevant session recordings to identify and analyze behavior patterns. 

Seeing what users do before and after a specific event helps CricHeroes understand what users are looking for, what makes them stick around, and what turns them away. These insights enable CricHeroes to adjust their features and workflows to provide a smoother, more enjoyable user onboarding experience and maximize the likelihood that users will continue coming back.

Streamlining the user interface by removing unnecessary or unpopular features

Using Smartlook’s session recordings, the CricHeroes team realized that users rarely responded to pop-ups encouraging them to check their achievements. Instead, users tended to view their achievements after prompts from notifications. To resolve the problem, CricHeroes simply removed the pop-ups.

Analyzing session recordings for specific workflows helps the CricHeroes team identify and mitigate the obstacles that led some users to drop off early. For example, users can challenge other teams to matches. Before, users were required to share their contact information with opposing teams. But once CricHeroes realized this requirement was causing some users to abandon the challenge, they changed it.

Resolving customer queries faster using Smartlook

CricHeroes’ customer support team uses Smartlook to help them resolve customer queries faster. By filtering session recordings to search for user IDs, the team can see what occurred when a specific person was using the app and quickly determine how to resolve the underlying issue.

Next steps for CricHeroes and Smartlook

The CricHeroes team is excited to continue updating and developing new app features based on insights gained from Smartlook. Next, they plan to improve nudges that encourage paid users to repeat purchases. They’re also exploring how insights from Smartlook can help their sales team optimize their landing pages and sales funnel.

“Using Smartlook really makes my work easier. It’s informative, insightful, easy to use, and features a nice user interface. Even though there’s a lot of information, I don’t feel overwhelmed. It’s very easy for me to view whatever I want. And there are so many features to help me work collaboratively with colleagues — sharing sessions, adding notes, saving a particular segment, and revisiting it.”

Parita Pithwa

User Engagement Lead at CricHeroes

The post How user journey insights helped CricHeroes improve their user engagement and retention rates appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Rooted in Istanbul and Tallinn, Vertigo Games is a small game development company that aims BIG. Their goal is to develop and self-publish first-person shooter (FPS) games with the best gaming experience and high quality production values.

Currently, they work on Critical Strike – an FPS game with fast-paced battles that entertain:

• 250k daily active users (DAU),
• 3M monthly active users (MAU).

They want to provide their users with the best gaming experience possible, polished graphics, and bug-free gameplay.

Smartlook features used

Session recordings

Watch authentic video recordings of users’ behaviors on your website. Replay sessions or segment recordings to focus on the most important user groups.

Funnels

Funnels let you analyze website user behavior step- by-step. Watch session recordings of each funnel step to discover why users drop off.

Heatmaps

Check where your website visitors hover and click to spot the most popular web elements. Get a clear picture of how users engage with your website.

Events

Track every click or interaction on your website. Identify which events are the most crucial and browse session recordings to explore interactions in-depth

Vertigo Games wants to improve their game development process

These days, gamers want a smooth mobile gaming experience. Errors, bugs, or crashes take players away from their devices and leave a bad impression on the game. Also, the chance a player will reach for the game again is rather low.

Vertigo Games know all this and the fact that game players are very demanding customers. But at the beginning of the development of Critical Strike, the product and development team didn’t know:

• How many gamers will complete the full onboarding guide
• If players complete the game’s missions according to the initial design
• What are the exact paths that lead to a bug and how to reproduce the issue?

Vertigo didn’t have any mobile analytics tool in place, so in case of bug detection they were driven by guesswork and assumptions. A less-than-ideal situation. 

As a result, the development process was time-consuming and didn’t lead to any valuable discoveries. 

“Before Smartlook, we couldn’t find the reasons for the drops occurring in various parts of the funnels in our game. In order to find a solution when we had a high drop rate, we were trying to experience it ourselves and to determine the source of the error in the specified place, which caused a great waste of time.”

Sinem Bulut Selduz

Game analyst at Vertigo Games

Soon, Sinem and Hazal from the Quality Assurance team, realized they needed to invest in a mobile analytics tool that could help them dissect gamers’ behavior.

With user behavior analytics, they would know how many gamers complete the onboarding guides, what are the bug sources, and at what point players encounter those problems.

Also, Vertigo Games believed that a behavior analytics tool would help them improve their KPIs – gamers’ engagement, retention, and in-app monetization. 

Smartlook adds an analytics layer to the Critical Strike mobile game

After doing some thorough research, Vertigo Games decided to invest in Smartlook. The analytics tool lets them analyze Critical Strike and all in-app user behaviors.  Setting up Smartlook was fast, so the Product and QA teams started gathering insights in no time at all. 

Vertigo Games reduced the number of bugs and provided their users with a swift mobile gaming experience 

Smartlook works in the background, so it doesn’t affect the gameplay or cause FPS issues. 

Vertigo Games uses screen recordings, event-based funnels, and heatmaps to get to know the full gamer journey and gamers’ experience. They literally can analyze their product through the end users’ eyes, with amazing results. 

How do screen recordings help Vertigo Games?

Screen recordings serve the QA team to monitor Critical Strike for any bugs. 

Also, when there is a complaint from a certain player, the team can easily check the recorded screens of that player. It lets them detect the problem, and it’s easy to reproduce the issue step-by-step and apply fixes.

The Product team also watches players’ screen recordings. They are most interested in the recordings of new players – they check whether a gamer completes the onboarding guides. 

Also, they verify if gamers get a great first impression of the game. It’s important, as the better the gamer experience, the higher the number of daily and monthly active users will be. 

But Vertigo uses other Smartlook features too.

How do heatmaps help Vertigo Games?

Heatmaps help the Product team view the gaming experience through the gamers’ eyes and understand where gamers click the most often. This knowledge helps develop a game that’s fully optimized for its users.

How do funnel analytics help Vertigo Games?

The most prominent feature for Vertigo Games is the 30- and 60-step funnel based on different events – tutorial, game start, game end, show offer, buy funnel, upgrade popups, etc. Both the QA team and Product team use them to verify the functionality and gamer experience throughout the game. 

As there is no limit in the number of steps in each funnel, the teams can adjust the funnel length when they add new missions to the game. 

Whenever the QA team sees a high drop-off in one step of the funnel, they can immediately scrutinize the problem. 

With Smartlook, Vertigo Games saves 10-12 hours of their development time

Thanks to helpful insights from Smartlook, Vertigo Games can analyze game players’ behaviors and spot any problems that cause drop-offs in the Critical Strike funnels. 

These insights help them design the whole game according to their game players’ needs and expectations. 

But the best success indicator comes with numerical values. And here, Vertigo Games can be proud of their accomplishments. In general, with Smartlook insights, they found an average of 10 bugs and saved 10 to 12 hours of their development time for each release. 

“We chose Smartlook since it provides us with every single data that we could ever ask for. The platform offers many advanced features. For example, thanks to your API, we can easily access and monitor in-game behaviors. And Smartlook’s stable SDK in terms of development are real time-savers. We can also recommend your customer service – whenever we faced a problem, someone from support helped us a lot.”

Hazal Bulut

Quality assurance tester at Vertigo Games

Joanna Kaminska

is a content marketing strategist at Smartlook. She is a seasoned writer interested in storytelling, SaaS and new technologies. Her goal is to create content that is easy to understand for all. After work, she enjoys hiking and nature photography. | LinkedIn profile

The post Vertigo Games uses Smartlook to improve the mobile game development appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Hookle is a Finnish startup that offers a social media management app for Android and iOS. Developed with Flutter technology, Hookle’s app provides an easy-to-use interface and a great user experience.

The app helps busy entrepreneurs and small businesses in managing their social media accounts and improving their brand recognition. So far, 10k+ users in over 130 countries boosted their social media presence with Hookle. 

Smartlook features used

Session recordings

Watch authentic video recordings of users’ behaviors on your website. Replay sessions or segment recordings to focus on the most important user groups.

Mobile heatmaps

Check where your website visitors hover and click to spot the most popular web elements. Get a clear picture of how users engage with your website.

The pandemic stopped Hookle from collecting user feedback

Not all companies treat feedback from their users as a gift. 

However, the Hookle team is different – they always want to hear from their users and learn if there’s room for improvement.

But when their product was ready to collect the first round of feedback, the COVID-19 pandemic hit with a vengeance. This is an exceptional factor because the Hookle team couldn’t meet with their users face-to-face. 

“When COVID-19 broke out, we couldn’t meet with our customers and learn what they thought of our app. During a team discussion, we realized that we actually need a tool to learn something about our customers and their in-app behavior.” 

Jere Seppala

Chief technology officer and a Co-founder at Hookle Inc.

They had very high expectations towards using a new analytics tool.

The Hookle team wanted to:

• Check which features in their mobile app are useful for their users
• Improve user experience (UX) and app usability
• Give their users fast and accurate support

On a more granular level, they wanted to check whether the chart is useful to their users or which buttons are the most important.

Another crucial case for Hookle was troubleshooting bugs. Problems with bug reproduction was an annoying experience, so the Hookle team wanted to find error sources faster. 

All those expectations came down to the most important goal – to delight their clients, so they leave 5-star reviews on Google Play, Apple Store, or peer-to-peer review sites.

Hookle wanted a mobile analytics tool that supports Flutter technology

The Hookle team developed their app in Flutter, so their new mobile analytics platform had to perform well with this technology.

In the beginning, the Hookle team tried UXCam, a mobile qualitative analytics tool.

“We tried UXCam, but the company’s pricing was hidden in a way. Thus we continued searching for and evaluating other available options in the market. Luckily, we found Smartlook that also supports Flutter technology. As it happens, Smartlook came out on top for us as a great investment with clear, straightforward pricing.”

Jere Seppala

Chief technology officer and a Co-founder at Hookle Inc.

Smartlook turns out to be a true gem in Hookle’s technology stack

Smartlook’s implementation and onboarding processes were straightforward. Good documentation helped Hookle’s developers connect Smartlook with their tech stack, in super quick time.

Now, it’s been 5 months since Hookle has been gathering valuable insights on how users experience their app, for real. What did the Hookle team achieve in this short but intense 5-month timeframe? 

Shorter and more intuitive user onboarding 

The Hookle team wants to provide a fast and intuitive mobile onboarding experience for their users. They want to make sure that their users know how to synchronize their social media accounts with the Hookle app.

“Instagram and Facebook didn’t make it clear to users how to sync their accounts. It required a certain amount of time and was troublesome for users. We wanted to make it more frictionless. With Smartlook’s screen recordings, we improved the app onboarding. Now, there are no failed onboardings and account connections.”

Jere Seppala

Chief technology officer and a Co-founder at Hookle Inc.

Hookle’s support team reacts to customer problems upfront

A happy customer is the key to exponential business growth. The Hookle team understands that concept very well, so they want to be proactive to their customers’ inquiries. 

But sometimes, it’s hard for the support team to fully understand the issue a customer is facing. For instance, there are mismatches between what the user describes they did and what actually happened. Session recordings from Smartlook make it easy to solve any discrepancies and find the root problem faster than any other data could ever do. 

Thanks to recordings, the development team saves 10 hours a week on bug finding and bug reproduction. That’s an amazing amount of work hours saved each week.

But that’s not all. Once a support specialist noticed that one user had a problem with publishing his posts, they reached out to him and showed him what was going wrong. And it didn’t take long for the customer to show his gratitude by writing a 5-star review, which you can read below.

Heatmaps let Hookle verify their hypotheses faster

In the Hookle app, a user can swipe the statistics chart in different directions. Hookle team’s first assumption was that users view the chart a lot and interact with it. They were also wondering what part of the chart is the most popular.

But the heatmap verified their hypothesis very fast. It turned out that their app users rarely interact with the statistics chart. Thanks to Smartlook’s heatmap feature, the development team resigned from making the chart more interactive and saved 2 whole weeks of development time. 

Results that sealed the partnership for years 

Thanks to Smartlook’s helpful insights, the Hookle team improved user experience and app usability. And the truth is, a steady stream of feedback about intuitive design flows down from review websites. 

This is how Smartlook changed the way Hookle works:

• Upfront action to solve customer problems before they reach out to the support team
• Fast hypotheses’ verification
• An intuitive and user-friendly app interface

“We still work on our product. Smartlook is one of the most important tools to understand our users and design a product roadmap that fulfills their needs. Smartlook is an industry pioneer – it’s intuitive, flexible, and easy to integrate. Oh, and yes – it supports Flutter technology, which is extremely important for us.” 

Jere Seppala

Chief technology officer and a Co-founder at Hookle Inc.

Joanna Kaminska

is a content marketing strategist at Smartlook. She is a seasoned writer interested in storytelling, SaaS and new technologies. Her goal is to create content that is easy to understand for all. After work, she enjoys hiking and nature photography. | LinkedIn profile

The post How Hookle saves 10 hours weekly on bug reproduction appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

StoragePug offers self-storage businesses a website platform called “Insights.” The platform helps rent out facilities faster and attract new tenants. Moreover, the platform has 2 modules: a Lead Manager and a Unit Manager. They help StoragePug’s clients manage facilities, nurture leads, and track data. 

StoragePug serves 600+ self-storage businesses in the US. The company has many client success stories that underline the necessity of their product for this industry. 

Smartlook features used

Session recordings

Watch authentic video recordings of users’ behaviors on your website. Replay sessions or segment recordings to focus on the most important user groups.

Funnels

Funnels let you analyze website user behavior step- by-step. Watch session recordings of each funnel step to discover why users drop off.

Heatmaps

Check where your website visitors hover and click to spot the most popular web elements. Get a clear picture of how users engage with your website.

Events

Track every click or interaction on your website. Identify which events are the most crucial and browse session recordings to explore interactions in-depth

StoragePug searches for the right analytics tool during massive growth 

With market traction, the brand broadened the focus from mom-and-pop to businesses with 30+ facilities in different locations. The change resulted in a 68% growth in yearly ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

But the fast growth came with many challenges. 2 of them being, how to keep their platform optimized and how to learn more about their customers’ behavior.

To tackle those challenges, their Head of Design came up with an idea to get an analytics tool. She believed it would help the company get the right kind of data about their users’ behavior and the unit rental process.

After giving Hotjar a chance, the StoragePug team realized that recent changes in that tool no longer helped them achieve their desired goals.

“We resigned from Hotjar because they removed funnel analysis, and we couldn’t see where people were leaving the page. It was crucial for us to see the exact moment that the person is leaving and watch the session recording of it. Also, the heatmaps stopped appearing properly on our websites, the hot spots were not in the right places (i.e. next to the button rather than on the button).”

Ana Batista

Director of design at Storagepug

As StoragePug wasn’t able to get all the data they needed from Hotjar, they started looking for a Hotjar alternative. The intention was to get a tool that had the following capabilities:

• Funnels and custom event creation
• Powerful APIs
• Always-on session recordings
• Advanced segmentation

After detailed online research, StoragePug decided to go with Smartlook.

StoragePug gets a smooth and agile custom implementation 

Besides installing a tracking code, the StoragePug team used Smartlook’s API to set up a series of custom events. 

Although StoragePug got a custom implementation, everything went swiftly. Below, are examples of custom events created via API:

• The number of visits to the Insights platform
• Portal log-ins
• Location page visits
• Log-ins to the Lead Manager
• Log-ins to the Unit Manager
• Button clicks

New findings that power up StoragePug’s website platform

StoragePug uses the full potential of Smartlook, from session recordings and custom events to funnels and heatmaps.

“Smartlook is a great help for us. When we release a new feature in our product, we want to see how it impacts our clients. So for the first couple of weeks after release, we watch session recordings and look for behavior patterns or any abnormalities. Some people in our company filter session recordings by custom events, which saves their time.”

Tomasz Modzelewski

Senior product manager at Storagepug

Smartlook provides insights about feature adoption

The StoragePug Product team launched a new feature called “scheduled email reports.” They wanted to see if their users prefer the new way of accessing data over visiting the interface of the Insights platform.

The team filtered session recordings, leaving only those with users who tried the new feature. After watching this set of recordings, they validated that the users prefer to access data via the scheduled email reports than visit the platform itself.

Based on those findings, and after seeing that this new feature remained stable, the team decided to promote it to their whole user base.

An even more user-friendly interface thanks to data from Smartlook 

At first, the Product team designed tiles in the Lead Manager that were small and non-interactive. Session recordings gave a completely new view into what the users’ expectations are. 

Recordings revealed that users tried interacting with those small tiles. They wanted to access a specific dashboard, for example, to see all the details about their new contacts. 

This information was a game-changer for the StoragePug team. When they saw loads of rage clicks in the tile area, they planned to change the Lead Manager tiles into their next feature called “Home screen”. The new feature had bigger, clickable tiles, and fresh microcopy. Now, users can get into their dashboard details with just 1 click. 

When it comes to making big-picture UI optimizations, the team uses heatmaps. They help them make decisions about placing certain features above or below the fold.

The customer success team saves 8 hours a week and becomes more efficient

By adding Smartlook to their tech stack, they can now provide an outstanding customer experience. When it comes to solving customer problems or tracking down bugs, they react fast and efficiently. 

“Smartlook helps a lot in the customer success team. You know, sometimes clients come to our support but often, they come with inaccurate information. Thanks to Smartlook, we can filter session recordings by the customer’s email and see where and why the problem happened. It saves our team at least 8 hours a week.”

Tomasz Modzelewski

Senior product manager at Storagepug

Session recordings help the customer success team explore any reported issue before they reach out to their developers. Only when the recordings confirm a bug, do they use their devs’ help.

For developers, recordings are also life changing. When they want to reproduce a bug, they watch what steps the user took that led to a bug. 

Strong data that strengthen the partnership 

Here are the 3 ways StoragePug has benefited from using Smartlook:

1. They are aware of how users utilize each feature and if it makes sense to devote time to develop them further. With this knowledge and past experience of which feature is useful and which isn’t, it’s now easier to build a product roadmap that’s more user-centric. 
2. Smartlook made the customer success team’s life easier. Before, they were often looking for problems with help from their developers, which was time-consuming for both parties. Now they can solve their clients’ inquiries faster, without their developers’ engagement. 
3. Developers reproduce and fix bugs 10 times faster than before. Before, it was hard to find the step-by-step journey that led to a bug. With recordings, they have a new view of what led to a bug so the fix time is shorter. 

Now, the StoragePug team is more efficient, agile, and data-driven. But what’s most important, they keep on innovating the self-storage industry, providing world-class software to the delight of their customers. 

“Thanks to Smartlook we stopped running around in the fog. We finally see real interactions between our clients and our product and ensure that it’s intuitive for them. Smartlook was super easy to put in place, and we can’t imagine our cross-team efforts without it.”

Tomasz Modzelewski

Senior product manager at Storagepug

Joanna Kaminska

is a content marketing strategist at Smartlook. She is a seasoned writer interested in storytelling, SaaS and new technologies. Her goal is to create content that is easy to understand for all. After work, she enjoys hiking and nature photography. | LinkedIn profile

The post How Smartlook became a perfect alternative to Hotjar for StoragePug appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Disqo is a marketing research company known mainly for its large survey base.

In the age of GDPR, CCPA, and “cookies-free” policy, it’s increasingly challenging to gain feedback from a target audience. One of the available options is to use surveys.

Disqo is running a massive online community, Survey Junkie, where millions of users are willing to share their insights and provide feedback. The online community serves as a service for companies eager to get genuine answers from real people.
People at Survey Junkie use a designated website or a mobile app to fill in questionnaires. Once they finish a survey, they are rewarded with gift cards or cash.
Disqo uses its survey platform, among other tools, to help companies evaluate their advertising campaigns or test a new design.

Over the years, the team at Disqo integrated Smartlook deeply into the company and developed a system on how to get the most out of behavior analytics. Let’s look at a year-by-year overview:

2017: Customer support discovers Smartlook

Disqo officially became our customer on February 13th, 2017, for the symbolic monthly fee of $100. The company was amongst one of our first paying customers. It was just 1 year after Smartlook was founded, and all resources were invested into development and almost none of them into promotion, making Smartlook a new under-the-radar tool.
Why Smartlook in particular? Because customer support at Disqo was looking for a tool that makes identifying their customers easier. The team at customer support could now search users by their email address or their ID. They also highly appreciated the ability to sort users by their location – that filtered out people from countries that were not supported.

Smartlook was quickly integrated for everyday customer support tasks, like:

At this phase, Smartlook is used solely for the purpose of watching individual users who are reporting issues.

2018: The product department gets involved

It simply happened by coincidence – David – one of the company’s product managers, noticed a tool on a screen of one of his colleagues from customer support. David had never heard about Smartlook before but immediately he started to investigate if there could be any use for this tool in his product department.
Instead of waiting for dissatisfied customers to contact customer support, David decided to proactively use Smartlook to prevent problems in advance. By measuring activity in the Events manager, the product department was able to anticipate particular issues on the website where customers were struggling.

One of the parts that required special care was the sign-up process. Product designers at Disqo looked at videos of the initial sign-up experience to see where users were getting stuck or having trouble continuing. Perhaps a lot of users were clicking on the wrong button or answering the initial questions incorrectly.

“After implementing insights retrieved from Smartlook, 20% more people were able to finish their registration successfully,” says product manager, David Agajanian.

Events were also perfect for finding out if a new design works as expected – if there are only a few people using the new feature, something was wrong.

2019: Developers are part of the Smartlook group

So far, customer support and the product department are working together to report and prevent issues. One piece of the chain is missing, though – developers who repair bugs in the first place.
A new product manager got an idea to implement Smartlook directly to the developers’ teams and share the reports with individual developers in order to create an effective debug workflow.
Regular reports were created, warning developers about possible issues that could easily be achieved by observing spikes and other irregularities in events, which often signals a potential problem.

Another new process involved regular UI testing – from now on, every change in design was evaluated by using Smartlook tools – especially events. If any new design didn’t have good numbers in Smartlook, subtle changes were made, and customer support carefully evaluated the users’ reactions.

2020: A well-oiled machine with a single goal – destroying bugs

In 2020, more people were trained to use Smartlook, especially those coming from customer support. That gave the product managers and developers more tips for uncovering bugs.

Debugging workflow: From reporting the issue to fixing the problem

Over the years, Smartlook users at Disqo developed a well-oiled machine on how to get rid of bugs.

Weapons against bugs:

The future:

Smartlook’s NextGen platform released at the end of 2020 brought several positive changes. The main one is that NextGen made it much easier to focus on user privacy.
Besides, it is now much simpler to switch between the different developer environments from testing to staging to production. NextGen was designed to work in teams. Currently, Disqo is trying to fully utilize the report sharing and user permission system to polish their already well-developed workflow.
Anomaly detection released in the spring of 2021 made life easier for the product department. Instead of manually investigating spikes in events, product managers simply wait for an email announcing a sudden change.

The biggest upcoming challenge will be to integrate Smartlook into the mobile app using Smartlook Mobile SDK.

Wrapping up:

The Disqo case study is a mirror of our development journey at Smartlook. In the beginning, they used Smartlook as a simple gadget for customer recordings. Gradually, as we offered more and more features, the great team at Disqo was able to fully utilize Smartlook as a powerful all-in-one tool.
Unfortunately, many of our customers still get stuck on the basics and are using only basic features such as recordings and heatmaps. Using advanced features and connecting different departments helps deal with issues and prevent problems while streamlining the overall flow of projects.

author Petr Vecek

Content Manager

The post Disqo and Smartlook: Growing together since 2017 appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Who is this e-commerce giant?

In the Czech Republic, Alza basically represents a synonym for an electronics e-shop. It is the biggest e-shop of its kind in this region and approximately 22nd biggest in the world (October 2020). For years now, the shop is much more than just electronics. It also serves as a platform for buying toys, bikes, tools, books, or even cosmetics.

It was founded as Alzasoft in 1994 and became a leader on the Czech market in 2008. In 2014, Alza decided to expand other European markets such as Germany, Austria, Hungary and Great Britain. In the year 2017, Alza tried to give it’s brand a futuristic flair by selling Tesla cars and allowing customers to pay in Bitcoins. It is also known for supporting more than 80 NGOs.

Last year, Alza continued in its rapid growth:

What was the mission?

Alza represents a business so large, that processing all the analytical data alone is creating a challenge in itself. There are millions and millions of visits every month. Managers, marketers and designers in Alza have to handle terabytes of analytics coming from different server structures. On top of that, every country is dealt with as a stand-alone project.

Alza is trying out several analytical tools, some of them very renowned, but in the end, none of them seemed to fit.

How did things change with Smartlook

„Thanks to implementing Smartlook, our UX department is now much more independent. We are fully capable of carrying out analytics on our own, no need to send requests to dev and wait the whole week or longer for results. What a relief.“
Lukáš Hadamčík, UX&UI Lead

Before Smartlook

Google Analytics runs the show. Although this tool is allowing very precise quantitative analysis, it can also be tediously slow in this setting. If some of the department decided to set up a new event, for instance, it would take up to a week or even several weeks to have the data ready and initiate the analysis. If they did miss out a specific parameter, they had to wait another week to adjust the event or a funnel. In one instance, it took so long to get results, that the analysis was no longer valuable for the team member requesting data. Analysing specific parts of the web is resembling lengthy detective work because there is no option how to select particular occurrences quickly.

In this fast-paced setting of the e-commerce electronics business, Alza experts were trying to find a more flexible tool.

Then, unexpectedly, Alza found itself an analytical partner from the same country. Alza met Smartlook for the first time during a marketing festival in the spring of 2019. To cut this story short, Alza tried out a premium package a couple of months later and has stayed loyal to Smartlook ever since.

Smartlook is moving in

Things were about to become much smoother when Smartlook moved in with Alza. They still worked with Google Analytics a lot, but Smartlook quickly became a sweetheart for quickly testing out a new design or new segment of goods.

Integrating Smartlook in the company was fairly easy. Every department got access to the app and also was advised to go through Smartlook School. Professionals at Alza are smart cookies, and the Smartlook interface is very intuitive, so nobody ever requested any formal training.

The considerable advantage of Smartlook was the option of filtering visitors that are tracked. Instead of trying to make sense out of tens of thousands of sessions, experts in the company could now watch 10 or 20 sessions to grasp the problem. Using only a small part of all session recordings is saving money and time for many people in the company.

Extremely useful when testing a new UI design, Smartlook allows users to zoom in on specific events quickly. All the user has to do is to filter recordings for a particular event. Then, a first customer session is opened in the player just a couple of seconds before the event. Instead the whole X minutes, you will spend the only couple of seconds of your precious time. Nice-to-have when handling your average small eshop, but absolutely critical when analysing this multi-million dollar enterprise.

Another significant improvement consisted of retroactive events and funnels. Smartlook is collecting data continuously. That means tracking events is automated and without the need to turn anything on, the tools will start filling your storage ( Have you ever seen a hungry pac-man?). When you open a specific event, a button on the shopping cart for instance, historical data will be ready for you right away.

Who has the closest relationship to Smartlook

Product manager

Toolkit: Recordings player, event manager, funnels

What is the every-day struggle?

Product managers need to know if everything in the product works as it was designed. A good product manager is also an observer. He or she can understand customers and separate them into groups. Based on the right insight, a product manager should come up with new features or prioritize the current development of the web or an app.

How is a product manager using the tools:

A product manager can define various events which need to be observed, create funnels over these events and then check the conversion rate of each funnel. Then he or she can just simply use these funnels to see only the relevant recordings and analyse the user behaviour. For a product manager, it’s priceless to observe users on the recordings in action.

UX designer

Toolkit: Recordings player

What is the every-day struggle?

A UX expert should, above all, listen to the customer and feel his/hers behaviour. A good designer can make the whole customer journey effortless and intuitive. They should identify components of a website that are too hidden or too difficult to understand.

And in the first place, they should always be on the watch for that irritating stuck button; in case people are clicking furiously without success (hence „rage clicks“).

How is a UX designer using the tools:

A/B testing is an excellent method of how to figure out if a design is working. But not that much when you ask why is that so. Recordings make designers literally see where the issue is. Watching a specific user will give the UX designer that unique insight which is hard to get with numbers only.

Segment manager

Toolkit: Heatmaps

What is the every-day struggle?

A segment manager has to care about specific segments of the e-shop. It could be fridges or stoves, it could be computer games, it could be real cars. The Segment department is also coming up with valuable ideas for the content departments, such as product guides.

How is a segment manager using the tools:

With heatmaps, segment specialists will see very quickly where people click the most. That way, they can determine which drop-down menus or buttons should come first and where.

Content specialist

Toolkit: Heatmaps

What is the every-day struggle?

Content specialists are managing displayed information on websites, blogs, video-channels and others. In a large e-shop like Alza, the big challenge is to optimise specific elements on the page, so the most important info is ready at hand for the customer.

How is a content specialist using the tools:

More specific, content managers use heatmaps to watch which details of the page are getting the most attention. If an element doesn’t get enough attention, they have to collaborate with UX to create a better flow. On the other hand, it’s important to ensure that customers are not flooded with unnecessary details.

Why does Alza like Smartlook?

● No need to send requests to dev.
● You can filter specific events in recordings.
● They can’t get enough of our heatmaps.

And why Smartlook likes Alza

● They have trusted our young company with their enormous business.

author Petr Vecek

Content Manager

The post Alza.cz: World’s Top 30 ranked E-shop finally found a long-term analytical partner appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

What parts of your website are important to you but not to your visitors? Heatmaps can help you determine this.

An innovative company needs website heatmaps

Sewio is a pioneer in a new market. They manufacture real-time locating systems (RTLS) which are used to track people and assets as they move through indoor facilities.

Their customers use Sewio RTLS in industrial environments to track material flow, moving forklifts, or personnel. However, their technology is also used to track athletes, go-karts, and livestock.

And like any modern company, Sewio has a dedicated marketing team focused on improving conversions.

How Smartlook’s website heatmaps turned out to be a first step towards improvements

The first step towards improvement is to collect data. Sewio used Smartlook’s heatmaps to achieve this. Check out how the page initially looked and what the heatmaps showed.

What Sewio learned about their homepage from their website heatmaps:

• The buttons in the hero section are below the fold. Some people may not be able to see them
• Almost no one clicks on the client logos linked to customer success stories
• There’s a 30% visitor drop-off rate between the logos and subheadline — which signals that people perceive it as a false bottom
• You can see a significant visitor dropoff rate in the “Become the Digital Innovation Hero” section where no links are present. It looks like people are not interested in it (this section can be removed)
• Very few people click on the customers and partners boxes and almost no one scrolls through the free consultation section

Armed with these insights, Sewio set to work making changes. They cut sections that weren’t attracting visitors. They moved primary call-to-action buttons above the fold. Also, they revised the section linking to customer success stories. 

Now their webpage is jam-packed with enticing copy and buttons that make it clear where you can click. 

This is how their webpage looks now.

Sewio achieved better e-shop visibility and customer references

And these are the results:

• Go to store button clickthrough is now at 276 %
• People click on the success stories links 3,1x more
• Average time on page went from 4:01 to 4:29 

So, what does the company have to say about the results?

“With the insights from Smartlook, we’ve achieved our goal of increasing the visibility of our e-shop and customer references. This has helped increase the overall business efficiency of our homepage,” says Petr Passinger, CMO at Sewio.

“Smartlook became an integral part of any upcoming website updates – preceding and completing any of the changes we will make in the future. Witnessing the results sold us on the idea of using Smartlook.”

Increase your conversion rates with heatmaps

author Andrej Brabec

CRO specialist

The post How heatmaps helped increase clickthrough rate by 276% appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

What is Elitedate?

Elitedate helps you to find a romantic relationship. It’s a website that screens people through a detailed set of questions to match you with someone interesting. A potential partner for life.

The challenge

Redesign of the registration page caused a 10 percentage point drop in signups. And sorting this problem out without session replay tool would require a lot of trial and error. 

“We’d probably do a new layout, move elements around, try to put everything into one column and add or remove form fields,” says Radek Novak, founder of Elitedate.

A 10% drop in funnel completion? That equals to 10% increase in marketing expenses. So the smart people at Elitedate knew that they had to fix the registration page fast. “The original version of the site had a completion rate of 65% and it dropped to 55%. That was pretty significant,” says Novak.

This motivated Elitedate to try Smartlook for the first time.

The Solution

With Smartlook it took around 30 minutes to find the problem.

“You often need to watch only 5 to 10 users and you know what to fix,” explains Novak.

The problem was in the field where you’re supposed to type in your city. The company added a suggestions function. And it’d give you options when you started typing the name of a city.

“After watching a few recordings we quickly discovered that people were getting confused by some text that was popping out. A few replays were enough. Enough to find out what was causing the problem. Enough to see that the design wasn’t foolproof.”

The company didn’t want to pay for Google’s list of cities so they created their own system.

They loaded all of the bigger cities and their locations into it. The browser would ask for permission. And it’d detect your location.

But some of the smaller villages were missing and users would get confused by that.

“We’ve changed the error message and the name of the field. And people suddenly knew what to type in,” says Novak.

This, however, wasn’t the only thing Elitedate did. The company kept analyzing the registration process in Smartlook. And replays of mobile users revealed another issue.

Desktop users had no problem filling out the mandatory about me columns. But people were trying to skip them on mobile.

Often getting stuck and leaving the process altogether.

This led the team to replace 3 mandatory questions with just 1. And to make it optional. The rest of the questions got moved from the registration process to later in the app. To a place where they can prompt people to fill this out with emails.

The result

Elitedate found out about the original problem on Monday, with Smartlook it took less than 30 minutes to find it and the fix was deployed on Wednesday.

“We went from 55% completion rate to 63%,” explains Novak with a smile. “This was the moment I realized that it makes sense to use Smartlook.” And that was before they implemented the simplified version of mobile registration.

That added another 4% to the overall completion rate. “Our marketing is now 12% cheaper, thanks to insights from Smartlook,” Novak sums up.

Novak also quickly discovered something else. Another reason to use Smartlook.

Elitedate has a hotline. And when people call it’s often hard to distinguish between user error and problems with the design. A lot of the older users are not that tech savvy. So they might be getting confused about being logged into an email client and wondering why Elitedate is asking them to log in.

“They are not fluent with computers. And people on your team must filter what are our users saying and what is actually happening. A lot of stuff is getting mixed together,” Novak told us.

This is where Smartlook helps to find weak spots. You can watch people using your website and create hypotheses about what could be improved. 

“Then you try it from the UX perspective and realize that this isn’t optimal design. This process helps me to instinctively feel where’s a problem and improve the app. It’s a lot better than trying to figure out necessary changes based on calls with confused users.”

Novak mentioned a list of things that Smartlook helps him with:

• I want to optimize the design of a process. Such as billing options.
• We have a problem and we don’t know what caused it.
• Heatmaps help us figure out what elements are used or not. For example, we expected people to be interested in testimonials but no one clicks on them on the homepage.

“Smartlook means that we’re not treading in the dark. It’s a source of hypotheses. And it helps us to save time we’d have to spend on unnecessary experiments based just on our gut,” concludes Novak.

Want to make your marketing cheaper?

Try Smartlook for free and see how it helps to improve your conversion funnels.

author Andrej Brabec

CRO specialist

The post How Elitedate made its marketing 12% cheaper with Smartlook appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

You can still encounter difficulties explaining problems.

Problems that you can only guess as to why they’re happening.

That’s why we talked to award-winning studio Madfinger Games about the problems they face and how Smartlook has helped solve them. They develop their games in the Unity engine and use Smartlook to record players’ screens.

“There’s this situation in Shadowgun Legends when the player comes back to the world hub, and we expect them to go get a reward,” says Miroslav Ondrus, a CTO in Madfinger Games.

“But there’s 20 seconds where we simply don’t know what’s happening. They have finished a mission, come back, but don’t go get the reward,” explains Ondrus.

So then what?

Speculation. Sometimes the team could only guess why something was happening.

They would brainstorm possible reasons and perhaps use the customer care team to get in touch with users who behaved in unexpected ways. But not every player would be willing to talk about it. “It was fairly laborious to deal with those situations,” adds Ondrus.

Ondrus and his team would spend a lot of time thinking about the possible causes of the problem. But they wouldn’t be sure if they had found it and would have to confirm it in various ways.

How is Smartlook going to help Madfinger create better games?

“When we can’t see the problem right away, we have to spend a lot more time on it,” says Ondrus about why they started using Smartlook.

With screen recordings, you’re no longer in the dark. No longer having to speculate about blind spots.

Which left us wondering… does Ondrus know what events they are going to track?

“No. That’s the cool thing about Smartlook — we often have no idea what we’re going to need. And Smartlook captures everything for us. We can always set up an event later and start focusing on the problem when it pops up.“

People from Madfinger need to know how players interact with their game.

They need to understand where unexpected user behavior comes from. “Videos from Smartlook are another step forward for our analytics team,” says Ondrus.

But he also expects other people to use it. “Definitely the game director uses it, I use it because I am really curious, and probably our level designers”. They can watch if people complete a mission in a way they had originally anticipated. “I am quite excited about it, to be honest.”

Did the Madfinger team have any worries or concerns?

Ondrus mentions that their games are always cutting edge. “We’ll put most of a mobile’s resources to good use. So we were afraid that Smartlook might put too much additional strain on players’ phones.”

They decided to control the tool from the Cloud to choose what devices to run it on.

“We’re going to use it on high-end devices first, and we can always turn it off,” explains Ondrus. The plan is to slowly start using it on older phones, as well.

There were two more things that were essential for people at Madfinger.

They needed control over the recording bit rate. And information about how video uploads work.

Smartlook actually allows you to choose the screen recording quality yourself. You decide on the size of the file and associated FPS rates, and it uploads recordings only when a phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network.

It works in the background. In a non-invasive way to make sure that no users are annoyed. It doesn’t cause FPS issues, doesn’t drain battery, and doesn’t exhaust cellular data.

author Andrej Brabec

CRO specialist

The post How this award-winning studio uses Smartlook to make its games better appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

In our newest customer story, we caught up with Veronika Minovska, the Global Sales and Marketing Director of the content delivery network firm CDN77.com as well as the dedicated server provider 10Gbps.io. She’s worked with both companies for over four years, and she’s certainly seen a lot of changes, one of which has been Smartlook — a change for the better.

What do you use Smartlook for?

Mostly we use Smartlook for your heatmaps and visitor journeys. Heatmaps really help us figure out exactly what our customers want to see and what they use the most on our pages. Inversely, it also shows us what they use the least. Visitor journeys help us determine who our high-quality users are.

Which teams in your company use Smartlook?

Loads of teams use Smartlook, actually. Our account managers, the Marketing team, frontend developers, the Design team, and our Customer Support team started using it about a month ago.

What problems does Smartlook help you solve?

We have been able to create a process for uncovering interesting leads and determining whether marketing campaigns work or not.

In a kind of lead-scoring way, we determine what actions would make a visitor interesting or important to us. So, for example, when we launch a new marketing campaign, we can use Smartlook to take a look at every customer that has signed up from that specific campaign. We can then see what that customer did to lead them to sign up or what they will do after, giving us an idea of a good visitor journey. If we discover lots of potentially great customers, we can determine whether a particular marketing campaign attracted the right type of users for us.

How did you deal with this issue before?

We were using Inspectlet before. But then I discovered Smartlook, which gave us more bang for our buck.

Can you quantify how Smartlook helps you?

Most of our results are a little less tangible — more design- or experience-oriented results. But quantifiably, we discover and fix maybe two bugs a month, which is great.

What made you choose Smartlook over other analytics solutions?

Value for money. Smartlook records a much higher volume of recordings than other products for a fraction of the cost. And the possibility of analyzing and tracking more than one domain without any additional fee was also a factor.

author Amy Strada

Content and Copywriting

The post How CDN77.com Finds Their Best Visitors with Smartlook appeared first on Smartlook Blog.