The Affiliate Journey

For those that aren’t familiar with VisitorSpy.com, it’s a new program launched by Matt Callen (brother I believe to Brad Callen, SEOelite creator) designed to “record” your visitors while their on your web pages to see what it is they’re doing when they visit your site.

A Quick Overview of Why You’d want to Use a Program like this

Few affiliate marketers take the time to split test their landing pages. Myself I’ve started to obsess over it lately since I’ve seen the difference an extra 1-2% in conversion can mean for the bottom line.  A program like VisitorSpy (or CrazyEgg.com another alternative) allows you to see which elements of your web page your visitors are attracted to, click on, fill out etc.

By seeing how actual visitors behave while they’re on your website you can modify & tweak layouts, copy, calls to action and more to enhance the visitor experience and move them closer to a “conversion”, what ever that may be for your site.

Without using a program like VisitorSpy you’re just guessing at what your visitors want and how you can improve your landing pages.

On with the review…

For the past few months I’ve been a user of CrazyEgg.com analytics. It’s more or less the same thing as VisitorSpy, but VisitorSpy promised to offer video playback of each website visitor and how they interact with your website (more on this in a moment).

I was intrigued to say the very least so I decided to give it a try.

My first concern when installing any new analytics or tracking program is “how efficient is it”. You can do more harm then good if you install an app that causes your page load times to lag.

While the install on your actual page for VisitorSpy is just a snippet of JavaScript code, like other trackers including Google Analytics, there is a MYsql database you have to install on your server. I presume this database actually logs the information about your visitors, and then the VisitorSpy website queries your database to gather their analytics data when you want to review your stats.

Installation

I had some troubles getting Visual Spy installed, it was partially because I use a MAC and not a PC, the zip file that I downloaded when I setup my first website wouldn’t open on my MAC so I had to boot up my Virtual machine to Windows and un-zip the file there. This was a pain in the ass, but it ended up working at the end of the day.

I only installed Visual Spy on one site for now as I have other analytics and visitor tracking packages I’m using on other sites. I don’t like to make a blind switch to another program without allowing it to prove itself first.

The Stats

The stats are lagged by a few minutes in Visual Spy, but that isn’t anything new for analytics packages. Both Crazy Egg and even Google Analytics take some time to show the stats of visitors.

It’s pretty detailed, but nothing that you cannot get in Google Analytics. Of course I didn’t try this program out so that I could replace Google Analytics, it’s the best of the best IMHO when it comes to web analytic software.

The reason I did install Visitor Spy was for the so called “visitor spying” that was going on. When a visitor lands on a page you have your tracking code installed on their software supposedly records what the visitor is doing so you can “spy” and playback their actions later on. If you visit the Visitor Spy website you can see an example of how the play back works as well as do an example on your own of recording yourself on their site and playing it back. How does this work? I have my ideas about it below.

Here’s a screen shot of what you see when you log in to take a peek at your websites visits and stats. Notice how it shows the IP address, browser type etc. Next to the IP address there is a small play button. If you click that you will get to see what that visitor did while they were on your site.

How does Visual Spy Record

I had lunch with 3 friends after I first installed Visitor Spy on a site yesterday and I asked them about how this type of script could work. They’re all coders and after some explanation of what this program was doing they explained how they felt it worked.

They first off said, unless there was some sort of software on your visitors website there was nothing “server side” that could record or capture a visitors screen activity. Instead what you can do using Java is log every input of the keyboard and mouse that occurs when a visitor is on your site.

EXAMPLE: for the mouse you can log the X & Y co-ordinates of where the mouse displays on the screen and then also mouse clicks or keyboard strokes.

But that isn’t really video?

Correct, it’s not video, so the marketing behind VisitorSpy is a little bit deceiving, although anyone who doesn’t question the idea or know a bit about coding would understand.

My assumption is that all the logged data from mouse movements & clicks is logged in the database on your server then accessed by the VisitorSpy website to create what looks like a “video” of the visitor on your site. When in actuality what is happening is they are grabbing a screen shot of your sites page the visitor landed on then playing back all the information recorded such as : mouse clicks, mouse movement and keystrokes.

I’ll admit this is a lot nicer then what Crazy Egg shows me, how ever my big concern is that this could be a HUGE DRAG on system resources on your web server, especially if you’re on a shared hosting account.

As mentioned I’ve just installed it and am going to let it run for a couple of days before I make up my mind on whether to switch to Visual Spy for my landing page optimization OR stick with Crazy Egg.

A couple of things I really like

VisitorSpy shows the time the visitor spent on the site which is something CrazyEgg doesn’t share with you in their reports. It’s tough to get that info from Analytics and tie it into your Crazy Egg stats.

Visual Spy also has a solid built in conversion & goal tracker. You can setup conversion goals such as :sales, newsletter signups etc. and then work towards improving the conversion of those goals using their software to improve the call to action, location of key elements and sales copy.

I haven’t yet experimented extensively with the conversion tracking and goal system but it looks good and is a bit easier to setup then Google Analytics package for goals.

In Closing

If you have some time on your hands Google Analytics is a very powerful tool you can use to test and tweak a website to improve conversion, how ever it’s not as straight forward about how to do it. A package like Visitor Spy also adds in the ability to analyze your visitors actions when they land on a page.

Think visitors will click that ORDER NOW button? Maybe not, try changing the test to “GET STARTED” and see if that works better. There are hundreds of elements you can test on your pages to attempt to improve conversion you just need to take action and do the work. Visitor Spy appears to be a solid program to help you do this, of course I’ll report back after a few days of using the program to get a better feeling for how it actually works.

Until then here’s a link to give it a try, this is my affiliate link for VisitorSpy (just wanted full disclosure there Don’t feel you have to click it but if you found some value in my overview of their program please do!

UPDATE: I am no longer using Visitor Spy I’ve gone back to Crazy Egg Find out why here in my Visitor Spy Review Update.