Inspectlet review

Inspectlet is a web service that provides heatmaps, real time analytics, and their main selling point, videos of your users in action.

They have a very reasonable free plan – 2500 pageviews, 500 captures for a website. These seem to be split on a daily basis, however. If your site has a reasonably average daily use pattern this might not make a difference.

One nice thing about the free plan is that it covers your whole site. I have used the free Crazyegg plan for a while, and it only collects data for a page at a time.

On my personal trial, it seemed to count 17 videos for the day, but I could only see 7 in their list.

I have used the standard method to add the monitoring to my site – just a few lines of javascript added to the footer. The script is reasonably sized and loads fast.

Videos

Most of my site capture videos are very short – a few seconds. Maybe due to the nature of my site, I found very little useful information viewing them, but it is kind of interesting.

From my limited sampling, their captures seem to be very buggy. I have seen a 375×74 capture in which the user still interacted normally, and I have just seen a video where the user clicks a button and the video displays the wrong page loading (the user then proceeds to click where a button is on another page, and ends in the proper page).

Heatmaps

The eye-tracking heatmap show a visual map that uses the mouse cursor as a substitute for the user eyes. I'm not sure if this makes any sense, but they say there is research that support this. It does seem to match the expected area for my pages.

The click heatmap is just the classical map. Given how poorly it matches the actual clickable areas in the page, it seems like the display is somehow misaligned.

The scroll heatmap uses colors to show how far the users are scrolling down the page.

All heatmaps can be filtered by date (start only).

The heatmap list could really use the number of visits. Otherwise, we just know if a particular page had enough visits to make the information useful by entering each heatmap. For a large site with infrequently visited pages, I imagine this would get pretty bad.

Analytics

I have no idea how these are, as it is not included in the free plan.

Conclusion

Inspectlet still seems a little buggy, but if you ignore that, you get a lot of information on the free plan. The other plans seem to be on par to similar services. I e-mailed support once and they did answer pretty fast.

Overall, I'm still looking. It is interesting to note that Google Analytics now has a simple heatmap system, but it only use links clicked, not actual clicks (if you have several identical links on the page, they all display the same percent of clicks). It also ignores download links and anything that leaves your site. It is completely free for now, though – just go to your site in GA, Content Tab, In-page analytics.