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.

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.

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.

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.

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.