Why does user-website experience matter? What can you do to improve it? How does Mouseflow help you identify and visualize improvements? An interview with the Mouseflow CEO, Mikkel Wakefield.
Q: In a nutshell, what is Mouseflow?
A: Today, Mouseflow is one of the leading companies in the behavior analytics market. Mouseflow was established in 2009 with the idea of creating a behavior analytics tool that could show people exactly what their website visitors were doing on their site through session replay and heatmaps. Since then, Mouseflow continued to perfect the website behavior analytics tool by following a non-sampling, full-picture dogma that would tell you the truth about your website’s visitor experience. The goal of the company was to provide professional and holistic behavior analytics tools to everybody that has a website without breaking their bank.
I joined the company ten years later in 2019 as the CEO. My ambition is to make it a household name for everyone that wants to understand their digital footprint, increase conversions, and improve their customer experience.
CEO at Mouseflow
Q: What industries do you serve, and who are your current customers?
A: The beauty of Mouseflow is that it can provide value to any business type that has a website. Our clients come from a wide range of industries: E-commerce, Saas, Automotive, Medical and Pharma, Travel, Government Organizations and Agencies, NGOs, and many more. We serve businesses of all sizes, from mom-and-pop shops and 1-person startups to large enterprises with thousands of employees. Mouseflow offers the flexibility and security needed to cover a wide range of requirements to serve all our customers equally well.
Q: What exactly is website behavior analytics, and how does it work? What makes it important for modern enterprises?
A: Website behavior analytics is about understanding why people are doing or not doing something. Unlike traditional analytics like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel, and others, apart from showing how many clicks a button got, Mouseflow will also show you what led to the click and what happened after it. All that without hiring a team of UX researchers to stand behind users and watch them navigate your website.
Where we shine is that not only do we give you all the recordings and data, but we also tell which ones are more important to look at first. For example, you can build a conversion funnel and watch recordings of only the people who dropped out. Further, you can narrow it down by device, a specific geographic area, marketing campaign, or create custom tags to identify your recordings easily.
We know that identifying and prioritizing issues on your website can become overwhelming. Mouseflow had solved this problem by showing it’s customers when and where the visitor experienced friction on the website. This is done by enriching the collected data with behavioral information using machine learning. Through the use of automatic friction event tagging and our proprietary friction score, we enable our customers to focus on fixing their website problems instead of finding them. We help them save valuable resources and increase the efficiency and effectiveness across product, marketing, and UX departments.
When running a business at scale, finding a broken button or flow quickly can be the difference between positive or negative ROI.
Q: What are the biggest challenges of your clients?
A: Regardless of the size and the industry, all our clients face two challenges that we solve for them: Not knowing what exactly is going on their website and where to start fixing all the uncovered issues.
Some clients look at behavior analytics tools when a quantitative analytics tool cannot tell them what’s going on on their site or when business trends don’t correlate to in-app activity. Others come from businesses that have different teams managing website experience, digital marketing, and product. In those cases, adopting a behavior analytics tool comes as a natural extension of their activities.
The million-dollar question becomes whether they should continue investing in tools like Google Analytics or Mixpanel. Our answer is, unequivocally, that Mouseflow doesn’t intend to replace these tools but become another layer of data they can take advantage of to draw quicker insights and make better-informed decisions. Currently, Mouseflow has more than 300 integrations available to all of our customers, regardless of their plan, so that they can leverage all of their analytics stacks to improve their website experiences.
As with most qualitative research methods, features like non-sampled session replay and heatmaps inherently demand time resources to draw insights. At Mouseflow, we have understood this “pain” early on in our development process. We have designed tools like our friction score to help people prioritize their work by automatically tagging the “burning bridges” in their projects. We’ve also made it easier to create custom reports and dashboards that can be shared easily across departments and outside stakeholders, as well as conversion reporting through funnels and form analytics to quickly understand (and watch) how your website is performing.
Q: Tell us more about Mouseflow. What are its key features and capabilities? How does it compare to other behavior analytic tools in the market?
A: Mouseflow has been one of the precursors of the website behavior analytics industry. Since 2009, it has been at the forefront of the technology developing solutions to support businesses that want to improve their digital footprint.
Since the beginning, we made it our priority to show our customers everything that happens on their site by not sampling their data. You’ll record all visits without exception, heatmaps will be generated automatically for all pages without any further setup, and your data is ready to be dissected any way you want through our powerful filtering suite. All our features are ready to use out-of-the-box, freeing our users from running the risk of forgetting to set up segments to start gathering data.
When running qualitative research, more often than not, you don’t know where to start. That is one reason we developed our friction score feature to make your data more digestible and actionable. With Mouseflow, you don’t have to sit hours and hours on end watching session recordings, and you can always filter by friction score and events and get to the problems that need your attention the most.
Besides, Mouseflow makes it easier to visualize data and enriches it with contextual data. For example, Mouseflow heatmaps will tell you the average time your visitors hovered on a button and the conversion of clicks/ hovers to determine if your call-to-actions are strong enough.
We also committed to making Mouseflow a tool that was accessible to everybody, regardless of their background. The essential installation of Mouseflow doesn’t take longer than 2 minutes, and the only thing you need to do is press record on your website project to start gathering data.
Mouseflow provides faster, more meaningful insights than our competitors.
Q: Can you provide us with sample use cases for Mouseflow?
Mouseflow is a tool used across many teams from Marketing to Product, UX, and even Support. Apart from helping each team individually, it enables better communication between departments and helps resolve problems.
One clear example is how anybody in a project can identify Javascript errors on their website and transfer them to development for a fix by sharing a link to the recording. Best of all? The person receiving the link doesn’t even need to be logged-in to Mouseflow. We are streamlining communication inside and outside your organization.
Here’s another example: a Marketing team wants to put certain information on the page, and development suggests to move it below the fold. After checking the scroll heatmap for that page and finding that only 10% of the visitors scroll below the fold helps both teams understand the importance of placing the information above the fold.
Product and UX professionals use Mouseflow to visualize how their visitors interact with their platform, helping them uncover behavior patterns that would lead to product improvements, better UX flows, experiments, and hypothesis creation/ validation to improve the website’s usability. Besides, Mouseflow offers a much-needed, especially nowadays, window into the users’ unbiased experience. It is like having a focus group ready at your fingertips.
Q: Looking into the future, what are some market trends or technologies you see on the rise in the website behavior analytics space, and how is Mouseflow meeting these?
A: One of the most prominent trends for the upcoming years is the increased focus on privacy. GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California has prompted many businesses like ours to take a closer look at how we deal with our clients and our clients’ customers’ data. We are committed to providing the support, security, and transparency needed for our clients to be comfortable with our service and not run any risk regardless of the laws they are governed by. We have developed an intuitive whitelisting tool that enables our customers to be compliant quickly.
Another apparent trend is that with decreasing costs in data storage, there is an overflow of data and information that is impossible to consume. At Mouseflow, we continue to push the envelope and develop features that make it easier for our customers to draw quicker, meaningful insights through the use of machine learning and AI.
Last but not least, our world changed in 2020. While many businesses focused on providing an online experience, it now became more critical than ever to have conducive experiences that result in positive revenue growth. It is not enough to just be online anymore.
About Mouseflow
Mouseflow is one of the top players in website behavior analytics, used by more than 165,000 websites worldwide. Headquartered in Copenhagen, it also has an office in Austin, TX, USA. Mouseflow has been driving powerful insights for improving the website experience for websites for over ten years with exceptional customer support and keeping its technology at the forefront of the industry’s development trend.
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