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Website analytics tools like Smartlook can show your growth in terms of SEO, keyword position, and website traffic. Simply put, Smartlook should help you find out where you went wrong and find the right path to improve your website.
As you know, using website tracking and CRO tools is a must for every website regardless of the niche! However, choosing a service that will enhance your performance is challenging.
And Smartlook, a conversion rate optimization tool, describes itself as a solution for your website and mobile apps. But how true is that?! That’s what we’re here to find out!
In this article, we are walking you through detailed Smartlook reviews. If you’re already familiar with the tool and would like to start using the best Smartlook alternative, sign up on WatchThemLive right now!
Now, let’s get right into our review of Smartlook. Shall we?!
What Is Smartlook
Website analysis is essential for increasing traffic, improving your conversion rate, and eventually getting more revenue. But which marketing analytics tool is more useful and helps you more? Is Smartlook a reliable service?!
This mobile-based behavioral analytics tool claims to give you in-depth insights into your visitors’ behavior and interactions. As a CRO tool, it provides explanations behind your users’ movements.
According to their official website, this behavioral analytics tool provides 4 features including session recording, event tracking, funnels, and types of heatmaps for all websites. It also functions as a website traffic checker since it gives an analysis report based on your visitors’ information.
Now, let’s delve deeper into how it works and what each feature offers. Shall we?!
How Does Smartlook Work
To get started with Smartlook, first, you need to create a project on its dashboard. Secondly, it is necessary to integrate the SDK into your website or mobile app. For cross-platform projects, if you want to store all data collected in the same project, you should use the same key for both the mobile app and website.
For more information on Smartlook features, let’s get started!
What Are Smartlook Features
Smartlook aims to answer questions like what your visitors do and especially why they do that. Based on their claims, this qualitative analytics solution enables you to comprehend your customer behaviors analytics at the micro level. But how?!
Let’s get started with the features!
Analytics Dashboard
When your first Smartlook login, the first place you’ll see is the Smartlook analytics dashboard. On this dashboard, you can add customizable tiles with data. Moreover, if you add several projects into your dashboard, you can see each separately, and they can be either private or shareable with other team members.
To create a new dashboard, you need to go to ‘dashboards’ and then select ‘new dashboard.’ Your project provides data about project usage, the number of heatmaps, events, sessions, and funnels that you have used up per month.
You can choose from the tiles, including Events (event, funnel, and top errors), Recording (new vs. returning, top visited pages, top landing pages, top exit pages, notes), Location (top countries), and Technology (devices and browsers) to create your own dashboard. Each tile comes with its options, too.
For example, the Technology tile includes only 2 options: devices and browsers that your visitors used to see your website. If you want to add a ‘Devices’ tile to your dashboard, you can select the name of the tile and choose the data for what you need.
Session Recordings
Smartlook’s session replay tool (or recordings) enable you to record every user’s entire session on your website or mobile application. This means you get the visitors’ interactions on your site and the full context behind their behaviors. Using recordings helps you answer why they do what they do.
Smartlook has 30 filters to narrow down your recorded sessions. It also promises to track Javascript errors and rage clicks so you can view the session of the user who experienced the error.
But there is no option to view the recordings in a pop-up window or a panel on the same screen. That is, you cannot organize the recordings into folders or even tag them.
Event Tracking
When you set up Smartlook, it can automatically start all your website visitors’ interactions (via the session recording features we mentioned above) and enable you to track users’ events.
Smartlook collects all users’ interaction data, and you need to select which interactions appear in your dashboard as events.
Now let’s discuss its funnels feature to help you get familiar with this specific tool.
Funnels
The funnels refer to steps (i.e, events) your website visitors go through to complete your desired action, like buying a service or product. Building funnels is an essential use case of Smartlook event tracking because it enables you to analyze customers’ behavior through these key flows, figure out where your customers drop off and measure your website conversion rate.
Why do you need funnels for website qualitative analytics? As you know, the defects on your website (like bugs, etc.) will keep your visitors from becoming customers! By using funnels, you will find out where your website defects and barriers are in the conversion process, but you cannot figure out what the barriers are.
Now, moving on to the next feature!
Heatmaps
if you want to access your visitors’ interaction on your web pages by the data visualization method, you can click on the “Create heatmap” button in Smartlook. It is in the top left corner of its Heatmaps menu.
There are 3 matching criteria you can choose to create heatmaps, including simple match, exact match, and substring match. How are they different, though?
Well, a simple match refers to a specific URL match. That is, if you choose a simple match to set up heatmaps, then any other parameters beyond this URL will be ignored. So, the data will include any variation of the matching URL that includes additional parameters.
Its exact match option refers to tracking a URL with specific parameters. Moreover, the heatmaps data will come from the exact match for your specific URL, not more.
You can also use the last option (substring match) to insert only part of the URL to show the heat maps you need. For example, if your website is multilingual, choosing this option will enable you to see the data in the heatmaps tool across all the languages of the website and not just 1 language.
What about its pricing packages, you asked? Well, welcome to the biggest disadvantage! Let’s take a look at the pricing in the next section.
Smartlook Pricing
As you can see in the following picture, Smartlook offers a free plan that gives you access to 1,500 sessions monthly, 2 events, only 3 heatmaps, and 1 funnel. There are a lot of limitations in its free subscription. For instance, you cannot share your heatmaps and the number of sessions is so limited and insufficient.
In Smartlook’s first paid plan, there are also many limitations that make this service unaffordable. For example, its cheapest plan (startup plan) which starts at $31 per month has a limit of 5000 recordings monthly.
In contrast, using a Smartlook alternative like WatchThemLive’s cheapest paid plan (Individual Silver), which only costs $24 per month, you will access 10,000 session recordings monthly.
Therefore, Smartlook isn’t valued for money when compared to other similar, more efficient tools like WatchThemLive. If you’re interested to learn more about this service, you can read our WatchThemLive review to get detailed information about its features.
We went through Smartlook features and pricing. Now, let’s take a look at its clients’ experience in using this product!
Smartlook Reviews: What Clients Say about Smartlook
You might have come across several positive reviews on Smartlook, but now let’s check out what their real customers have experienced. Shall we?!
#1 “It’s Hard to Cancel Your Subscription”
As you can see, this client complains that he could not cancel his subscription to Smartlook, even after he decided not to use his package anymore. That is, Smartlook charged him despite the fact that he had removed the service. Moreover, he did not get any response from the Smartlook support team.
Read the following comment! Here is another similar review:
Moreover, there is no unsubscribe button on your account setting. According to this comment, Smartlook’s team do not send messages to remind your package expiration date. He thinks Smartlook is a scam since it does not offer good customer service! This is a huge red flag!
But to make an informed decision, here are some more comments left by customers.
#2 “Smartlook Doesn’t Show Accurate Data of Cities”
As you can see in the following picture, one of the clients complains that their visitors’ location (especially the city) is not accurate in some cases.
#3 “Smartlook Is Unable to Compare A/B Testing on the Same Heatmap or Video”
Another user complains that it is impossible to perform A/B testing for heatmaps and session recording on the same map or recorded video. This user had to switch to another tool because of this limitation on Smartlook.
Unfortunately, according to its real users’ feedback, Smartlook is not worth your money, and its pricing is higher than other behavioral marketing tools with similar features.
Smartlook Pros and Cons
In the following sections, we are going to list the advantages and disadvantages in the hope of helping you make better decisions!
Smartlook Pros
- It is easy to use,
- You can set up filters,
- It offers a free version.
Smartlook Cons
- Its pricing is high and inflexible,
- It is hard to cancel your subscription ( they will charge you even after you remove your plan),
- It has poor customer service,
- It does not offer A/B testing,
- It does not provide psychographic segmentation,
- There are many limitations to its free version,
- Its first paid plan has also some limitations, like its free plan.
What is The Best Smartlook Alternative
Now what? Have you made your decision about trusting your website with this tool?! Want to find Smartlook alternatives? Well, here we will suggest you an ideal alternative to Smartlook to pave your path.
WatchThemLive: The best Smartlook Alternative
WatchThemLive is an all-in-one behavioral marketing tool that helps you gain valuable information about your website to increase your conversion rate. Unlike Smartlook, WatchthemLive is worth your money and time.
In the following, we’ll give you more insights into its impressive features!
But if you can’t wait to get started with the best Smartlook alternative, sign up on WatchThemLive now!
WatchThemLive Features
This service gives you valuable marketing analytics about your visitors and UX on your site. WatchThemLive does its best in providing incredible services and tools to direct you to your goals.
If you’d like to read more about what WatchThemLive can do for you, keep going then!
WatchThemLive Website Analytics dashboard
Ever wondered who your visitors are, what devices they are using, where they are, and what pages they visit? Don’t worry! WatchThemLive’s analytics dashboard offers everything you need to know about your website.
In addition to answering mentioned questions, its dashboard also reveals other detailed data about your website traffic, including the number of your visitors, their browsers, operating systems, referral, landing, languages, and also their screen resolutions.
The good news is that you can export every data on WatchThemLive’s dashboard in either CSV or PDF.
Why are you waiting, then? You can sign up now and give it a try!
WatchThemLive Active Filters
There is also another feature called filtering which enables you to access the data you want conveniently. You can also use multiple filters to narrow down your website data. Pretty straightforward, isn’t it?!
All your data on WatchthemLive’s dashboard can be filtered by various factors such as page, name, email, country, language, session duration, date, and more.
WatchThemLive Session Replays
Wouldn’t it be great to see what your visitors did exactly on your website? Well, WatchThemLive’s session replay tool offers playback of all your visitors’ interactions on your website.
This fantastic feature enables you to figure out why visitors lost their interest in some web pages and decided to leave them or find what bugs they’ve faced along the way. So, by knowing your website’s barriers you have an opportunity to fix them and bring about a great customer experience.
What is the impressive thing about WatchThemLive session replays? Well, WatchThemLive shows console errors and you will get a warning whenever an error is detected. Additionally, you can share the recorded videos with your developers to find and fix problems!
WatchThemLive Heatmaps
Want to know the areas that get the most (or least) attention from your visitors? WatchThemLive heat mapping is here to help you. This service provides you with click heatmaps that show which parts of your web pages got the most (and least) attention from your visitors.
This feature is so helpful in forms, CTAs, and running campaigns. To sum up, Heatmaps use colors to show the most and least engaging areas on your webpage. For instance, it shows the areas with the most attention by using hot colors like red.
Let’s take a look at its other feature!
WatchThemLive Goal Tracking
Using ‘goals,’ you can set up custom events and track your visitors’ conversion. These custom events can be form submissions, page views, button clicks, or even scrolling. In the end, the number of people who complete your desired goal will be shown in the progress bar. This data is also exportable to PDF and CSV.
Why is it so essential? By using this tool, you can measure the success of your marketing efforts. So, why don’t you sign up now to see how fascinating it is?!
WatchThemLive Live Chat
Want to resolve customer service questions faster than ever? Try to find concerned visitor’s issue on your website? WatchThemLive’s live chat feature enables you to get access to your visitor’s session recording while s/he left a message on your website live chat.
WatchThemLive Video Testimonials
Do you care about what your clients say about your service and product?! The majority of your customers won’t record a video because it is so hard and time-cosuming. So, you need to focus on simplifying the process of getting social proof and bringing your satisfied customers in front of the camera. Well, WatchthemLive makes this process easier.
This feature allows you to set certain questions to be displayed on the screen as your customer records a testimonial video. Now, you can use your clients who are satisfied to encourage other potential users!
WatchThemLive Pricing
WatchThemLive offers its valuable services in multiple packages and at reasonable prices, each with different features. In addition, It has a free plan that equips all clients with the user journey, active filtering, 1500 page views, and 5,000 event tracking. If you choose to bill annually, there are considerable discounts for paid plans as well.
Smartlook Vs. WatchThemLive: Which Is the Final Winner
As mentioned before, Smartlook might not be the best choice for you. You can use similar but more efficient features in WatchThemLive at more affordable prices. As mentioned before, you will have 10,000 sessions recorded monthly in WatchthemLive’s first paid plan. Instead, Smartlook offers just 5,000 recordings monthly on its startup plan.
In addition, unlike Smartlook, you can cancel your subscription with no trouble and they won’t charge you again.
So, don’t waste another second, and sign up on WatchThemLive!
FAQs on Smartlook Reviews
So far, we have provided an all-inclusive review of Smartlook to help you see its reality. Now, let’s answer some of the frequently asked questions regarding this tool.
1. Is Smartlook GDPR Complaint?
If you use Smartlook to track personal data, its usage falls under GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant. For instance, If you record a form in which your customers fill in personal data (like name or email), GDPR will be applied to you and your usage of Smartlook services is completely legal under GDPR.
2. How to Install A Smartlook Alternative: WatchThemLive?
Here’s the step-by-step guide for WatchThemLive installation:
- Register or log in on WatchThemlive (click here to create an account),
- Then, you should add your website address ( ‘add new website’ button in the top-right corner),
- After that, you need to click on the “ Submit” button to finalize the process.
The good news is that you can easily install WatchThemLive on your Shopify store. For installing Shopify, you need to follow these steps:
- After submission, select “Via CMS Dashboard” as the integration method,
- You need to copy the Pixel code, and sign into your Shopify account,
- Click on the ‘online store’ button > Select ‘Themes’ > ‘Actions’ > then select ‘Edit Code,’
- Then, click on ‘ Theme. liquid’ on the left sidebar, Press ‘ctrl + F’ and search for the ‘head’ of your store code,
- Finally, you can paste your Pixel code before the section and save the changes.
Done! Pretty straightforward, right?!
3. Smartlook vs. MouseFlow vs. WatchThemLive: Which One Is Better?
If you are interested to know the difference between MouseFlow vs. Smartlook, keep in mind that Smartlook was founded in 2006 for small to mid-sized companies. It is good because of its comprehensive behavior mapping and conversion funnels.
But it might not be worth your money since there are so many limitations on its plans, and its starting price is $39 per month. so, it’s pricey compared to its competitors like WatchthemLive.
MouseFlow is decent for converting more leads, heat mapping, form analytics, and user monitoring. This conversion rate optimization tool was founded in 2009 and its starting price is $24 per month. But there are also limitations on MouseFlow’s Starter subscription (which is its first paid plan). For example, it only offers 5,000 recordings monthly.
In contrast, WatchThemLive’s first plan costs $24 (billed annually) offers up to 10,000 session recordings, and all its active filters are available. In addition, it provides 1,000,000 visitor event tracking and unlimited analytics by creating custom events.
In the final analysis, WatchThemLive has proven to be the better, more affordable tool!
Conclusion on Smartlook Reviews
Everyone knows how essential it is to use an analytics tool to analyze websites. In this article, we provided WatchThemLive and Smartlook reviews. Smartlook analyzes your website and gives you analysis reports on any website with data visualization methods like heatmap tools.
But after delving into Smartlook’s cons, you realize that in most ways, WatchThemLive is much more affordable. To sum up, WatchThemLive is a more cost-effective option, not only compared to Smartlook but also in the market.
Additionally, there are many limitations for the number of features in Smartlook’s free and paid subscriptions. On the other hand, WatchThemLive offers impressive behavioral analytics features.
Sign up now and try its free plan to guarantee your progress!
Author: Najmieh Sarmadi
