Webmasters Can See Your Every Move With Robot Replay

We are testing a little piece of java script from nitobi that powers their new tool called Robot Replay, and allows us to see your every move on www.firstpagefitness.com. Well, not “every” move. We can’t see what you type into the forms, but we can see where your mouse cursor goes, and which links you click on as you move about the site. It is like watching a Tivo video recording of a user browsing a website. Or, if you prefer, like Crazy Egg in realtime.

The Admin Interface for Robot Replay

Sound a bit too 1984-ish? We think so too, but don’t worry - we don’t like Big Brother any more than anyone else does and will be taking off the script here in a few days once we give it a proper test run. The script considers each visit to our website a session. Although it does not tell the webmaster “who” you are, it does provide the time and length of your visit. If a webmaster was really curious he or she could check their log files for that time period and obtain an IP address, get a general idea of which city you live in, which website you were at before coming to theirs and, if it was a search engine, what keyword you typed in order to pull up the result.

The Robot Replay Playback Window
Notice the big cursor; this is the user’s.

Why would First Page Fitness or any other website want to see a video of a mouse clicking around? To gather data that will help us improve our website, of course. We can see if you stop scrolling to read content for awhile, which would indicate that the content is of interest and value. Or if you quickly get bored with content and click away, we know that it wasn’t what you were looking for. Do you read the whole page, or just the first paragraph? Do you click back and forth? Do you have trouble finding some page that you were looking at before? I have already made a few small navigational changes based on the user behavior seen in some of these recordings.

What You Can’t See With RobotReplay:
A webmaster can not see your taskbar, tabs, browser menus or anything outside of the window that shows their own website.

Does it Work?
Yes, although we can only see the latest ten sessions at any given moment. I would not expect RobotReplay to stick around long before being purchased for serious bucks by a major analytics company.