Track website users’ movements in real time with Kansas startup Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange is a tool that enables secret stalking of website visitors, allowing the website owner to record and save their movements for analysis. Founded in 2010 by Danny Wajcman, Lucky Orange provides a suite of website analysis tools for $10 a month, including recordings, interactive heatmaps, live chat, polls and segmentation. The site will automatically capture and save the movements of every visitor to the site, every click, scroll and movement. This is to allow owners to find out how visitors are using their website and to give personalised feedback by watching exactly what went wrong when a customer reports having issues with the website. Other behind-the-scenes analysis provided is segmentation, which shows what browser and device site visitors are using. Also available are interactive heatmaps, which show where people are drawn to click most. Additionally, the pop-up polls available are the digital equivalent of an overly helpful shop assistant, but whose questions can be altered to suit the needs of each individual website. If a website user didn’t feel sufficiently self-conscious about indecisive mouse-hovering, an overly confused cursor might activate the live chat service. The people on the other end have the ability to talk the user through the problem whilst watching exactly what they’re doing in real time. This could be extremely helpful in aiding someone to use their website effectively by having a virtual assistant watching over your shoulder, but also seems a little intrusive. As a population, our digital footprints are getting larger and larger. Only recently known to us, Facebook has been sharing millions of people’s data without our permission, and almost every site we use is displaying advertising that is tailored specifically to our consumerist needs. Website owners are used to amassing huge amounts of information about their users, and  Lucky Orange is another tool in their box. However intrusive Lucky Orange seems, the fact is that a lot of the same data is available already on the free Google Analytics tool. This provides information on successful advertising and which browsers and devices used to access the site, just by adding a piece of well-named ‘tracking code’ to each of the site pages. A review written on startup community site Exploring Startups stated that although Google Analytics gives answers to the ‘what?’ and ‘which?’ questions posed by website owners, Lucky Orange helps with the ‘why?’ and the two tools should be used to complement each other. It helps fix small issues that wouldn’t be flagged otherwise, for example, if a button needs to be pressed two or three times for it to work. All of the information taken by Lucky Orange is anonymous, and it is a great tool that allows websites owners to put user experience first, increasing their chances of visitors becoming customers. However, with the recent precedence of data breaches, it’s not hard to imagine the possibility of the information being tracked back to specific computers, or even for the ‘tracking code’ to keep running over more than one website.