Record the Movements of Your Visitors With Mouseflow
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Record the Movements of Your Visitors With Mouseflow

9th January 2012

Last year I wrote about an interesting, and a little bit “Big Brother is watching you” tool on my Dutch blog WebSonic.nl and I thought it might be interesting to also share it here. I’m talking about Mouseflow, a nifty tool I discovered in November thanks to @Anneliesje to easily track visitors on a website.

At first this may not sound that special, but when Mouseflow is special since after it is installed, a visit is actually ‘recorded’, and with that I mean the mouse movements are recorded. This way you can literary track and see what your visitors are doing on the website, were they click, how they move and you can even see when someone is filling in a form (in that case you also know who the otherwise anonymous visitor actually is!). Recordings are available immediately.

Next to the recordings you can see more general statistics, like how long visits were, how many pages someone visited, what the referring website was, which browser and operating system was used, country, most popular pages, heaviest and slowest pages, longest pages, etc. With this data combined with other tools you have a great way to analyze a website.

So how does this work? The video below shows us:

Installation

The installation of the tool is very simple. You just have to add a little line of Javascript code to the <head> section of your website. That’s all. After that everyone who visits the site is recorded. Mouseflow runs on Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 3+, Chrome 3+, Safari 4+ and Opera 9+.

Pricing

If you are interested to try out the tool you can set up a free account here. With this free account you can add Mouseflow to one website and you have a maximum of 100 recordings per month. Besides that you will get click heatmaps, movement heatmaps, viewport maps and link analytics. Paid subscriptions start at 10 euro and then you have 1000 recordings per month, you can download recordings, there’s SSL Support (for shops) and more.

Live Stream

With a paid subscription you have another cool feature: the Live Stream. With Live Stream you can see what a visitor is doing in (almost) realtime! So if someone is filling out a form to request information you can even call or email them, if you are really quick, before they even hit send 🙂 (Ok, ok, you probably don’t want to do that).

Opt-out

Privacy is a huge matter these days. If you are scared of being recorded after reading this there is a way to opt-out and make sure that your actions are never recorded, on any site that has Mouseflow installed. In that case go to mouseflow.com/opt-out

Just for the record: we are not using this tool on our website right now, so you are not being recorded at this very moment.

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Written By
Michel Wester is the owner of the Dutch website WebSonic.nl, started in 2004. WebSonic mainly focuses on news about Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Next to the news the site has a lot of tips for PC users and starting web developers.
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