AstroPay is a fintech payment application that connects 5M+ users with 500+ merchants in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe.

The company offers:

• AstroPay App – a digital wallet designed for users who need to perform real-time operations in their local currency and with local payment methods.
• One Touch – a product that allows users to easily and securely make deposits and withdrawals directly from the merchant site

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

AstroPay wants to make more informed decisions about their web and mobile application 

In early 2020, AstroPay didn’t have much granularity in their data about how users interacted with their product. They didn’t feel that they were focused enough on feature adoption and the user journey. 

To take a more informed approach, the AstroPay team decided to invest in a behavioral analytics tool. With the tool, they wanted to:

• Analyze data about the user journey
• See feature adoption
• Detect anomalies and bugs
• Catch where users get stuck
• Stay compliant with privacy regulations 

After getting analytics data, AstroPay wanted to back every decision with relevant information. As a fintech company, they had to choose an analytics partner that was cognizant of their privacy compliance needs.

Smartlook becomes an alternative to Hotjar and Lucky Orange

At first, AstroPay chose Hotjar for their website app and Smartlook for their native mobile apps. 

But the constant switching between the tools was troublesome. Another problem was that Hotjar didn’t support native mobile analytics, which made the AstroPay team search for a tool that tracks both website and mobile app. They tried Lucky Orange, but it didn’t support mobile either.

“You know, at some point we got enlightened: ‘Hey, we had a good experience with Smartlook, and it would let us track both website and mobile, let’s implement it on our website as well.’ And I think it was a good decision – Smartlook is easy to use and we have both projects in one place.”

Milena Brum

Full stack developer at Astropay

Successful migration sealed the deal between AstroPay and Smartlook

Website tracking code implementation was as easy as on mobile back in the day. In evidence, even a newly hired AstroPay employee managed it in a couple of hours.

“I like Smartlook because it’s easy to work with – when we have a new team member, it’s a matter of hours until they figure out Smartlook and we don’t have to spend too much time on training them.”

Milena Brum

Full stack developer at Astropay

How AstroPay uses Smartlook to optimize sales funnels and product interface

Most product teams use Smartlook. They create event-based funnels, heatmaps, and use session recordings. So far, they optimized the sales funnel, product user interface, and the whole purchase process. 

Every development team followed an iterative process and supported their decisions with data from Smartlook.

“Smartlook is very helpful in understanding why some users are unable to complete certain flows, as we can see exactly what steps they followed, as well as where they see errors or decide to abandon the flow.”

Karen Bauer

Product manager at Astropay

AstroPay simplified the purchase flow for their users

Before Smartlook was implemented, it took 3 steps for AstroPay users to buy foreign currency, which made the process hard to complete. The team created a 3-step event-based funnel to analyze the purchase flow in-depth. 

They realized that the biggest funnel drop-off happened on the 1st step. With data from Smartlook, the AstroPay Website team revamped the purchase journey. 

“Smartlook helped us improve our most important sales funnel. After making the user journey one step shorter, the drop-off rate decreased by 42.72%.”

Milena Brum

Full stack developer at Astropay

More intuitive user interface with new visual elements

The AstroPay team wanted to encourage their visitors to switch to their preferred language version of the website.

The team couldn’t agree if they should add interactive flags next to the language version, or if they should leave the interface as it was. Some team members were concerned that the flags would be confused with the unrelated “gift card” feature. 

Finally, the team agreed to add the interactive flags and monitor them with Smartlook’s session recordings and a heatmap. It actually turned out that users found the visual flags easy to understand.

“I wish we knew Smartlook earlier, it would take many problems out of the equation. The tool helps us solve our team’s discussions when there is one opinion versus another. Instead of being led by hunches, we look at the user behavior data. With such evidence-based decision-making, we’re sure that our actions serve our users in the best way possible.”

Milena Brum

Full stack developer at Astropay

The Cryptocurrency team reduced buyers’ anxiety and drove conversions up by as much as 56%

Smartlook helped the AstroPay team spot problems in the cryptocurrency purchase process.

The team created event-based funnels and detected an anomaly there – a lot of AstroPay users resigned from completing a cryptocurrency purchase. 

After session recordings analysis, the Cryptocurrency team concluded users were dropping off because they had more steps to accomplish when they didn’t have a local currency in the e-wallet.

After the team added local currency as an option to finalize cryptocurrency transactions, the conversion rate grew by 56%.

Another finding in Smartlook was that users spent between 3–5 minutes searching for their newly purchased cryptocurrency inside the AstroPay wallet. Users didn’t know that the transaction was pending, which resulted in a reluctance to buy cryptocurrency in the future.   

To reduce buyer anxiety, the Cryptocurrency team provided each cryptocurrency buyer with a banner “Purchase pending.” This reduced users’ hesitation and now users buy cryptocurrencies in less than a minute. 

Partnership for the next decade

AstroPay started out from a self-service and grew to a customized website and mobile analytics project. Now, they’ve a Smartlook’s account manager that ensures they reach their analytics goals. The fintech company is one of Smartlook’s power users, getting many business advantages out of this mutual cooperation.

These are 3 key business outcomes:

1. AstroPay justifies every decision with reliable data from the analytics tool. There are no more guesses, hunches, or pointless discussions. Every decision is based on data which results in a healthier bottom line. 
2. Smartlook empowers every person in the AstroPay team. With a behavioral analytics tool, everyone in AstroPay has a chance to propose ideas for improvement. It makes their brainstorming sessions more productive.
3. The AstroPay team monitors new and existing features and analyzes feature adoption. The tool also helps them detect anomalies and build a web and a mobile app that’s user-friendly, safe, and bug-free. 

What’s important, Smartlook provides AstroPay with tools to limit collection of personal or sensitive data that may be subject to the GDPR or LGPD. The tool hides all the personal data, so AstroPay can focus on providing the safest and simplest financial app for millions of people.

“You know, we tried other similar tools before we chose Smartlook, and in comparison, there was always a bit of a learning curve. In my opinion, Smartlook is easier to grasp. And we have this personal touch, and I feel like both AstroPay and Smartlook grow together, helping each other provide better products every day.”

Milena Brum

Full stack developer at Astropay

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 AstroPay improved sales funnel, boosting conversions by 56% 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.

Established in 2008, 4finance is one of Europe’s largest digital consumer lending groups. It provides services for customers in 13 countries, and has offices in Madrid, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Riga as well as in other countries. To date, the company has issued €8 billion in loans and lines of credit.

The group operates under a number of brands, including Vivus and Zaplo. The company also offers deposits, in addition to consumer and SME loans through its TBI Bank subsidiary, an EU-licensed institution with operations in Bulgaria and Romania.

The UX department in 4finance is responsible for providing a smooth user experience for their customers. How do they cope? We sat down with Olegs Jarosevics, Senior UX Research at 4finance to find out the answer to that question.

 The Interview

SL: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? How did you end up as a UX expert?

Olegs: I started in 2012 as an UX intern and worked in a variety of startups. In 2014, I worked for Accenture as a UX architect and did a wide variety of things for them. In 2016, when I joined 4finance, I decided to narrow my focus and shifted to UX research only.

SL: You told me earlier that your company had to try 10 different analytics products before finally settling down with Smartlook. That sounds like quite a journey.

Olegs: A long time ago, we had Clicktale, one of the first tools in this category. It worked, but it had a lot of drawbacks. Then we transitioned to a combination of Fullstory and Hotjar. Since Hotjar decided to discontinue funnel functionality, we were forced to look for some new tool which provides visual funnels. We tried about 10 different tools before purchasing Smartlook. All of them were either too expensive or lacked some crucial functionality – funnels, recordings, ability to see the customer’s console, etc.

SL: Considering the number of very different products and departments that you have had to handle, I´m not surprised about your demands for analytics tools and their features…

Olegs: True, at 4finance, there is a team behind every product. In terms of analytics, the UX department is the owner and the main user of Smartlook. So, when a certain team has some questions regarding users’ behavior or product performance, we usually do tracking and analysis and provide them with some insights. Sometimes teams want to monitor data (such as funnels) themselves, then we teach them how to use Smartlook so they can use analytics on their own.

Most often, we are collaborating with product and marketing teams. They are basically interested in three things:

1. Tracking performance of their product, such as the conversion rate.
2. Understanding users’ behavior.
3. Getting rid of bugs and technical issues.

SL: What is the biggest challenge so far in terms of UX analysis?

Olegs: Our products are simple, but have many different variables depending on the individual customer, so it can be quite difficult to see the big picture. When our users are applying for a loan, they can have up to five–six different loan resolutions and depending on the resolution that is available to them, the next step in the flow will be different. At the end of the application, the user can be approved, rejected, the loan amount can be decreased, we may even require additional documents and so on. So, as you can imagine, you have a lot of very complex funnels in the end.

SL: You mentioned funnels as a crucial point in evaluating other apps. Is this feature something that sold Smartlook to you?

Olegs: Definitely one of the most frequently used features are funnels and recordings. As you know, we actually found you randomly via Google, completely unaware of your product. The first thing we liked about Smartlook is automatically generated events, that can be used for funnels or filtering without any development needed. Due to our limited development capacity, this was always a bottleneck for us.

SL: What is the relationship between SL and Google Analytics in your company? What kind of data do you strictly use Google Analytics for?

Olegs: Data from different sources are used for triangulation. But most of the time, Google Analytics is used to measure the impact of marketing campaigns.

SL: Our sales team told me that privacy was also a major factor for you…

Olegs: The main concern was to be fully GDPR compliant. Other parameters also matched our needs, so we decided to give it a go and purchase a paid package.

SL: Glad to have you on board. To fully utilize tools like Smartlook, one has to have a pretty good idea what criteria to measure. Do you have a standardized process?

Olegs: There are some KPI which we are monitoring. These are a combination of business metrics and UX metrics.

UX metrics like the number of errors per task or time spent on a task – can tell us how difficult a specific part of the journey was for a customer. Also, we are measuring satisfaction with our products. Every project is a little bit different, and we try to choose metrics based on the context.

In terms of business metrics, we focus on the number of applications, number of loans, average loan size, number of registrations, conversion rate, etc.

SL: Implementing a new UX design is always stressful and sometimes difficult to evaluate. When is the point you can tell yourself: “Good job, we did it”?

Olegs: When both the business and our customers are happy with the product!

author Petr Vecek

Content Manager

The post UX at 4finance: Why are funnels for financial products so intricate? 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.

And that’s exactly the kind of value a lot of companies are getting from Smartlook. So let’s look at one of them.

The company

Disivo is a SaaS tool that helps e-commerce stores to significantly improve revenue. It optimizes pricing based on various inputs like product performance, the current situation on the market and price of the competition.
It can do a lot. Really. Just imagine changing prices for hundreds of thousands of products at once.

Pricing is a sensitive topic. And the team working on Disivo understands how crucial it is to quickly find and fix any problems users might be experiencing in the app.

The problem

“We would often hear: ‘I did exactly what you told me and it didn’t work.’ And we needed to know if our users really followed our instruction and if it was a technical issue,” says Petr Blaha, CEO of Disivo.

Disivo uses various monitoring tools. Like Sentry. And internal logs. So even before Smartlook they could look into those and have a rough idea of what any user did.

But it’s not ideal. When you see the order of actions in a log file? You don’t get a good understanding of how someone behaved.

“Sometimes, people need to fix prices for certain products that are part of a special offer. So they can do that quite easily by setting up which products’ prices should be fixed,” explains Blaha.

A pattern would emerge. Those clients would often say that their settings weren’t reflected in the actual pricing.

So the team needed to check what’s happening.

Before Smartlook that would mean going to programmers and have them check logs. Developers would spend an hour on it. Maybe two. “When it wasn’t a technical issue it turned out to be a huge waste of time,” points out Blaha.

And that’s just one example.

Another common problem was when people used the export prices function.

The team behind Disivo always recommends checking at least a few dozen products to make sure that the prices are correct.

And they would get complaints. Remarks about the function not working properly.

The solution that brought ROI 400%

Disivo chose to monitor these situations with Smartlook’s events.

“People spend a lot of time in our app. A session is often between 20-50 minutes long and without events, it would be extremely hard to figure out what parts of the recording we need to look at.”

So? Disivo created a bunch of events for business-critical moments. Such as approval of data export. Manual changes to pricing. And saves of a pricing strategy.

The company used a combination of events tied to a visited URL and clicks on buttons with unique CSS selectors. Events were then used to filter recordings where those business-critical moments happen.

And watching them made a couple of things obvious.

“We’ve discovered that people aren’t telling us the truth. Not that they would lie on purpose… but they would often say they did exactly what we told them to while in reality, they didn’t follow our instructions,” says Blaha.

People usually skip the approval phase. Entirely. The whole thing.

Instead, they just click on the prices export function. 

Smartlook-Events-Breakdown

“We’ve seen that people don’t bother checking even the first 20 or 30 products. That confirmed our suspicion that they don’t read anything before exporting the data”, Blaha describes his observations.

So Smartlook now helps the team to troubleshoot a lot of problems without developers.

“We just watch a recording to see what a user did and in what order. And we talk to developers only when we can’t figure out the source of a problem,” explains Blaha.

Blaha is also quick to point out that developers’ time is extremely expensive.

“When I think about how much of developers’ time I am saving with Smartlook I am easily around 300-400% ROI. And that’s just for the devs. Once your support team starts using Smartlook, ROI goes up even more,” Blaha says with a smile.

That’s quite an ROI. And the reason why Smartlook is now an essential part of Disivo’s tools.

“Sometimes we’re in shock when we see how much better could be the design of some of the functions. Especially when a user takes an action 3 times and still fails. Smartlook really helps our team to create a better product,” concludes Blaha.

author Andrej Brabec

CRO specialist

The post How events in Smartlook brought ROI 400% 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.

The company

In creative is a marketing agency focused on improving website performance, creating online ads, promoting clients on social sites and helping with the recruitment of new talent.

It has worked for brands like McDonalds and their CMO Michal Baturko Olbert has shared with us a story of an underperforming client.

The challenge

Conversion rates were abysmal. This e-shop didn’t perform nearly as well as it could. Order completion was at 18 % while the industry standard is around 40 % and it can go even higher.

In creative needed to figure out what creates friction for this e-shop. Figure out where it’s leaking money. And what to change.

They’ve been doing this for 12 years. And after this much time, you can just look at a page and see possible problems instantly. But guess what? Even with all that experience, you can’t just go and start making changes.

“Instinct can be useful. But only as initial hunch about what’s happening. That doesn’t mean we’ll start fixing things right away as our first guess might be wrong,” says Michal Baturko Olbert, CMO of In creative.

So what to do then? You need data. And the right analytics tools.

They allow you to explore what are the most likely sources of problems and to increase the amount of winning AB tests.

And that still assumes things. It assumes that the client agrees to run AB tests, which might be a challenge of its own.

The solution

For In creative it was important to analyze funnels.

The company used Smartlook for this. And it meant that the agency could watch why people were leaving the e-shop it was optimizing and look for patterns in that user behavior.

Funnel for the ordering process quickly revealed that the shipping prices were too steep.

It was only at the last step of the funnel when people were shown the final price with shipping included. But you could see a summary of product prices the whole time, no matter where you were in the e-shop. So prices of the products themselves were not a problem.

And the last step of the ordering process was the exact point at which people were leaving. “It became clear what the problem was. It was all about shipping prices,” says Michal.

This is how funnels look in Smartlook.

This gave In creative the idea to change the funnel so that shipping would be shown first. Comparison of shipping prices with competition came next. And surely enough, the e-shop’s shipping was more expensive.

So In creative suggested their client a slight decrease of shipping costs and adding more post offices where you can pick your order up. And the number of completed orders skyrocketed.

The result

The changes brought over half a million dollars in yearly revenue.

That’s because the number of completed orders jumped from 18% to 47%. That’s a 161% increase achieved in 2 months.

As you can probably guess, the client was ecstatic.

It took the agency about 25 hours of work and programmers implemented the changes within another 15 hours.

“With Smartlook we can do our work twice as fast. Sure some of it is thanks to our growing experience but watching people using a website is simply essential,” Michal told us.

Michal also says that replays make it much easier to convince clients to do AB testing. “When you can visualize problems to a client, show them a funnel and explain what numbers they should be at… it’s easier to warm them up to AB tests.”

These are some of the reasons Smartlook became a crucial part of the optimization process at In creative.

Increase the number of orders in your e-shop

author Andrej Brabec

CRO specialist

The post How an agency used Smartlook to increase e-shop orders by 161 % 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.

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.

author Vladimír Šandera

Cofounder, optimist

The post Smartlook Helps RobertNemec.com Boost CRO of Their Clients’ Funnels appeared first on Smartlook Blog.