Troubleshooting:Visitor Recordings

This is a troubleshooting guide specifically for Visitor Recordings. For general ClickTale troubleshooting, please see Troubleshooting.

ClickTale is not recording

There are several easy to fix reasons why ClickTale might not be recording properly:

• The code may not implemented properly

You should check your page’s source code to ensure that the ClickTale tracking code is present.

• Your recording ratio may be too low

If you set your recording ratio too low, it may take a while until a visitor is chosen for recording. If this is the case, you may want to increase your recording ratio. Please see here for directions.

• You may need an integration module

If ClickTale is not caching your HTML or you are getting “302 errors”, this is most likely a case where you need to use one of our integration modules. This usually happens for dynamic sites such as ecommerce sites. Please choose a module based on your site’s architecture or platform.

• You've may have used up your daily recording quota

Each type of ClickTale plan has a monthly recording quota, automatically distributed per day on our paid plans and per week on our Free plan. Once the quota is used up, ClickTale will stop recording until the next daily refill (quota is weekly for free accounts).

You can view your remaining quota by logging into your ClickTale account and clicking on the “View quota” link on the left side of the page.

• You've may have used up your domain tracking quota

The number of domains you can track simultaneously depends on your plan type. You can view your domain tracking quota as well as choose which domains to track in your “Manage domains” page. You can access this page by logging into your ClickTale account and clicking on the “Manage domains” link on the left side of the page.

• You’ve may have modified the code

If you have modified the ClickTale tracking code, please be sure that the path to our JavaScript file is left intact and/or points to the physical location of the file.

Another option is to run ClickTale debug. You can do this by adding ?ct=enable,debug (for URLs without parameters) or &ct=enable,debug (for URLs with parameters) to the end of the URL in the browser address bar and hit Enter. This will open up a dialog (if ClickTale is present) which will tell you if your site is being recorded or not.

If none of the above solutions work for you, or you have any other questions, please see our forum post regarding this topic.

The content of the recording was not retrieved successfully

When trying to watch a recording you may get the following error: "The content of the recording was not retrieved successfully. ....". This error occurs when our server is unable to cache the page visited by the visitor and can be caused by various technical reasons. In the visitors page, click the expand icon to expand the recordings of the visitor. The errored recordings will have an exclamation icon near them.

Just hover your mouse over the icon to see the error message, and see the fixes below.

Error Messages

"302 - Found" or authentication issues

Your server has returned a redirect response. Depending on the page and the implementation of the site it could be that the server expected to receive certain cookies, either for authentication purposes or for verifying cookie support. Our server expects an HTTP Ok response (200) for each URL that we request.

Possible solutions are:

• If the page is protected by authentication or based on session variables, see here
• If the page accepts and processes a POST request, see solutions here
• If the issue is related to missing cookies, you may need to modify your site to skip the cookie check if the userAgent is "ClickTale bot" and just return the content immediately.
• You may use ClickTaleFetchFrom variable from our API to set an alternative URL for us to cache (fetch) from. It could be a URL with some extra parameters that would affect your behavior or a completely pre-calculated static HTML URL.

"Embedded content missing" or "Partial upload"

You may receive this error if you are using the ClickTaleUploadPage method for page content capturing. This error will occur whenever we receive partial or incorrect content data by using that method. Sometimes there is just not enough time to upload the content from the client side, other times it may be due to network errors. This is the con of using the ClickTaleUploadPage method and no solution is available.

404 error when using the ASP.NET integration module

Can be temporary due to cache misses. If consistent, please investigate your configuration using the module manual and contact support.

Misc communication error

This could be a temporary error. If you see this message regularly, please contact us through our forum.

Server not found

It could be that your server is located in a private network and is not accessible over the Internet. In this case ClickTale can't cache your pages in the regular way and you will need to switch to a different mode of operation. The possible solutions to this are found here.

If this solution does not work for you, or you have any other questions, please see our forum post regarding this topic.

Corrupt End/No Load

Corrupt End errors occur when there are network issues in the visitor’s end, while No Load errors occur when the pageviews are too short.

In both cases, this prevents parts of the action data (not of the cached content) from being recorded correctly. These errors cannot be prevented, but are usually quite rare.

Getting 'Failed loading playback frame'

This error is most commonly caused by a redirecting code in your page that takes the frame to a different location than the one loaded by ClickTale and which ClickTale needs for proper functioning. Normally you need to disable the redirecting code in your page from running when the page is shown in ClickTale playback or reports. This usually requires some HTML or JavaScript coding. Once the redirecting code is blocked, you need to make new recordings before you see the change. Fixing the redirection will not make pre-existing recordings work.

There are two methods for disabling code from running during playback or reports. Method 1 uses ClickTaleExcludeBlock. By defining an exclude block around the redirecting code you instruct ClickTale to remove the block before processing, so the redirecting code is not executed.

Method 2 uses the CTIsPlayback function to detect whether the page is currently showing within ClickTale. If so, you should enable or disable functionality within the JavaScript of your page to prevent redirecting.

<script type="text/javascript">
function CTIsPlayback() {
   try { return parent && parent.WebPlayer; }
   catch(e) { return false; }
}
if(CTIsPlayback())
{
   // TODO: add code here to ignore redirect
}
else{
   // TODO: add original redirect code
}
</script>

There are also specific solutions for Google Website Optimizer and TinyMCE.

If none of the above solutions work for you, or you have any other questions, please see our forum post regarding this topic.

Pages aren't displaying the style properly

ClickTale only caches the HTML of your page, leaving all images, CSS and JavaScript as external references. As a result, updating the CSS in a not backward compatible way will cause some recordings to break. Adding new rules can be done in a backward compatible way but also in an incompatible way. Because of the cascading nature of CSS it is hard to tell what the effect will be without knowing the exact changes. It might be a good idea to keep the old CSS file unchanged and give the new CSS file a different name (stylev2.css or similar).

If this solution does not work for you, or you have any other questions, please see our forum post regarding this topic.

Why is my form showing question marks?

Occasionally shows question mark

If the visitor submitted the form but the fields still have question marks in them , the reason will be one of the following:

1. ClickTale only captures text that is a result of visitor's keystrokes. Therefore if the content of any field was pasted, typed before ClickTale started recording, auto filled or pre-filled by a "go back" operation it will show question marks since the visitor didn't fill them manually.
2. ClickTale decided to censor the text. This is by design. Our most controversial feature is keystroke capturing, and especially the capturing of strokes and text that the visitor decides not to submit. Even though this data is entered voluntarily, visitors generally assume that the information isn't sent until they click to submit it. As a result, it has been decided that ClickTale will mask all textual data in a pageview except for when a form is submitted by a visitor. We believe that this is the best solution to the delicate challenge of balancing privacy and access. Non-shared information is masked while the flow of the keystrokes remains visible, thus protecting your visitors while still providing you with data about browsing behavior. You can still generate "Form Analytics" reports on submitted and non submitted interactions but only submitted text is visible.
3. ClickTale shows asterisks in password fields and doesn't record passwords.

Always shows question marks

If the form always shows question marks in the fields and conversion is not detected, although the "Submit" button is pressed during recording, it is because you are probably not using a standard form submission element (<input type=’submit’>, <input type=’image’> or <button type=’submit’>). If you're using a link tag or an image tag with a JavaScript onclick handler, submission will not be detected - if we can’t detect the submit, the content will be blocked due to privacy issues. When making the change you will need to move your validation to the form.onsubmit handler.

If you have a form like this:

<FORM action="http://somesite.com/prog/adduser" method="post">
    <P>
    First name: <INPUT type="text" name="firstname"><BR>
    Last name: <INPUT type="text" name="lastname"><BR>
    email: <INPUT type="text" name="email"><BR>
    <INPUT type="image" src="submit.gif" alt="Submit">
    <A href="javascript:validate()">
      <IMG alt="Submit" src="submit.gif">
    </A>
    </P>
</FORM>

note: here 'validate' executes 'form.submit()' if the data is valid.

Change it to this identical form so it can be properly recorded:

<FORM action="http://somesite.com/prog/adduser" method="post" onsubmit="return validate();">
    <P>
    First name: <INPUT type="text" name="firstname"><BR>
    Last name: <INPUT type="text" name="lastname"><BR>
    email: <INPUT type="text" name="email"><BR>
    <INPUT type="image" src="submit.gif" alt="Submit">
    </P>
</FORM>

note: here 'validate' returns true if the form is valid.

If this solution does not work for you, or you have any other questions, please see our forum post regarding this topic.

Downloaded recordings don't work

Please make sure all files were unzipped and that you clicked the unzipped Play.htm rather than the zipped one.

If you are using an older Mac, please note that when you double-click the zip file, MacOS will mount it. Instead you should enter the following text in your Terminal (found in your Applications>Utilities folder):
unzip FILENAME -d TARGET_DIRECTORY (where FILENAME is the name of the downloaded zip file and TARGET_DIRECTORY is the folder where you want to unzip the file’s contents)

This should unzip the file properly and enable you to view downloaded recordings.