Heatmap for your site
Ivan | Tue, 2006-08-29 19:17| Attachment | Size |
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 cb_heatmap_full.jpg | 236.68 KB |
Through a weblink posted few days ago I rediscovered Crazy Egg, a really cool service with a free tool to get a heatmap on your site. It is really easy to install the code and the system will immediately start converting all traffic into a visually interesting map of where do visitors click. So, what did I learn from this test about creativebits?
Above you can see the top part of the heatmap of cb front page. Download the full heatmap in the attachement below. It is clear that many people click on the title to read the article in full. Many use the menu obviously and the hottest menupoint is the Critique. You can also see a few clicks on the Google Adsense ad as well.
In another represenation above you can see that Mackie's avatar has been clicked more than anything else. This shows that it makes a lot of sense to write on cb to get some leads. A strange thing is that many clicked on the image accompanying the article, which was not a link, but still some ppl expected it to open bigger or something. It is also interesting to see that the big logo on top is actively used as a navigation to go back to the home page, which is something I didn't expect.
On the full image you can see that the most popular area towards the bottom of the page are the pager links. This is expected of course, but this makes me think about making easier to use in some way. The hottest overall spot was the "read more" link on the very first article. If the objective was to make money on this site, I would have to think about putting an ad next to the "read more" links to get a high chance of people clicking on it. Nobody clicked on the bottom Google Adsense ad, which is again expected.
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I don't do web dev myself but will certainly be forwarding the link to many people. This is a very strategic and practical way to target the advertising on clients' websites.
Interesting about the CB hotspots, Ivan, and good news for Mackie!
Over what period of time were these measured?
Only 3 days.
Google Analytics has a site overlay which seems very similar to this. You do not get the fancy graphic hot spots, but it will give you a little bar measure with an expandable rollover telling you what percentage of users on that page hit wht links, and even how many clicks specifically.
Not sure if anyone here uses analytics, but a Great Stat tool in my opinion, especially if you are using Google AdWords as well.
The only downsides to analytics are 1) When I first signed up, I had to wait on a list for a bit to get an invite 2) They are extremely info abundant and can be pretty convoluted. This could equal confusion for many users.
Anyone else use Analytics? I am curious to see how you might compare it to other stat tools, and even a comparison on their overlay feature vs. this heatmap app.
www.dakeat.com
I use it too. It is very nice and informative. Pretty similar to the heatmap, just not as sexy.
Pechos,
I also find Analytics to be very useful. In addition to being able to track what links are clicked, I like being able to see how long a user stays on a given page.
Agreed, the options offered to analyze your traffic and data are Sick. I was going to try and summarize some of the cooler features, but realized that would take way more time than I actually have to sit down and write. Perhaps if I get a chance later I will append this post.
www.dakeat.com
Ivan - did you notice that everyone seems to click in the middle of text entry boxes? I've noticed this on my site too. In fact, _no one_ clicks the text box anywhere else. Freaky!
It logically follows that the insertion point should show up in the middle of the text box. I've seen some sites that have it this way, going to look into how it's done.
I noticed also that people clicked on images accompanying articles. On my site there is a list of favicons that link to those sites, and noone clicked CB, but a lot of visitors clicked AotW which is positioned not far from the CB link.