Heatmaps For Visualising Where Your Site Visitors Are Clicking

I’ve recently started using a new service called Crazy Egg, which is a fantastic data visualisation tool that allow you to get a clear picture of where your website visitors are clicking.

Crazy Egg has a very schmick Web 2.0-style website and offers a number of service levels, starting from the free plan, which is more than enough to get a feel for the service.

So, why use a tool such as Crazy Egg?

Crazy Egg is a great tool to help optimise your website content, particularly when there is no clear “action” such as a purchase or signup that you can track.

The obvious example is the humble blog. Which posts are popular? Which links? If you provide post summaries with “read more” links instead of full blog posts, then what text and positioning produces the highest clickthrough rate?

Questions like these are extremely pertinent if your monetization model includes Adsense or other revenue sources that are highly correlated with site “stickiness”.

Clickthrough rates off your homepage are also often a reasonably good proxy for overall site performance. For example, if 60% of visitors are bouncing straight off your homepage, you might want to work out how to reduce that number. You could test various homepage versions using a tool such as Crazy Egg to work out what content is hot and what’s not. If you can get a higher percentage of site visitors to click on something and engage with your site on a deeper level, higher revenue often flows as a result.

Testing Crazy Egg on the Marketing Results site

As a quick test (and to provide a graphic for this post) I ran a very quick test on the Marketing Results homepage. A few things struck me as interesting:

1. 1. Crazy Egg shows you exactly where users are clicking. Most other systems I’ve looked at will tell you that a link has been clicked, but that’s it. Crazy Egg tells you exactly where within a hyperlink or graphic a link has been clicked.
2. Many users click on graphics, even if they aren’t linked to anything. I noticed that many users were clicking on the graphic for my Client Attraction Newsletter, even though the graphic wasn’t linked to anything. Now the graphic links through to a page that gives further reasons why users should sign up to the newsletter.
3. What you think is popular content, and what is actually popular content, can often be drastically different. Will you hide your head in the sand and rationalise why you should leave unpopular content on the best real estate on the page, or will you make changes to boost your results? To me, trying to constantly optimise your results is a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how often people choose to ignore what the figures are telling them.

Anyways, have a play with Crazy Egg and see what you think - if anything, the cool heatmaps alone are worth the 2 minutes it takes to set it up. It’s all rather Predator-esque.

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15 Ways To Leverage an Article

Friend and client Mike Krsticevic from Advocate Mortgage Corporation recently sent me a mind map called “How to leverage an article found in a magazine that relates to your industy”.

It contains a number of great ideas so with Mike’s permission I’ve reprinted it below. Or if you prefer, here it is in PDF version.

How To Leverage an Article Found In A Magazine That Relates To Your Industry

1. Email a scanned copy of the article to your database preceded by a short commentary (if not already understood by your readers) that you wanted to keep them informed of changes in the industry. Induces reciprocity; builds pre-eminence.

2. Keep a copy of the article on file (preferably in scanned form that is readily accessible or searchable in a database) so that when you meet someone and the conversation you have with them lends itself to you being able to offer to email, fax or post the article to them, you can do so quickly. This will build your pre-eminence with that person.

3. Refer to the article in future emailings to clients generally and quote portions of it that are interesting without needing to send the whole article.

4. Contact the author and build rapport with them with the view to leveraging the contacts this author has with prominent people in your industry that he or she has interviewed and will interview in the future.

5. Contact the author and build rapport with the author with the view to becoming a quoted person/expert on future topics related to your industry in order to build pre-eminence.

6. Use the ideas in this article to realise that if you are trying to create a host-beneficiary partnership arrangement with a particular person or company, you could find a swag of articles that relate to your prospective H-B partner’s industry to increase your own knowledge of that industry AND send to the intended contact, from time to time, articles of interest to your prospective H-B partner - build rapport and pre-eminence via your increased understanding of their industry.

7. Develop a “stadium pitch” opening line using the statistics provided in the article, eg, “There are only two mortgage insurers in the market today and one of them has substantially increased its claim denials over the last 3 months. How will this affect your attempts to get a loan? Does your broker know who this mortgage insurer is? If they don’t know this information, what impact will that have on their ability to help you get the best loan deal when buying your new home?”

8. Use statistics from the article in your own copywriting material.

9. Presentation Aid: Make a copy of the article, highlight portions of the article and then place it in a plastic sleeve and bring it out when dealing with clients. Refer to highlighted statistics to show prospects three things: (1) you keep up with industry developments; (2) show how your knowledge of this information means you will provide them with a better service or the product you are promoting will help them avoid the problems raised in the article; and (3) use it to overcome an objection or pre-frame a prospect to remove a potential objection.

10. If the article is found in a magazine that is read by your prospective clients, you could consider entering into a H-B partnership arrangement with the magazine to access their database of readers (ie, your prospects).

11. If your prospects read the publication in which the article was published, you could prepare an article or two or a series for publication in the magazine in order to build pre-eminence with your target market.

12. Once you write articles that are published in the magazine, keep copies to send to your list of suspects, prospects and clients - massive pre-eminence builder.

13. Consider advertising in the publication you found the article in IF its readers are also your target clients.

14. Use an article or the information you find in an article (particularly statistics) as a reason to contact your database of clients (preferably via email) to conduct your own survey to cross-check the findings in the articles with a promise that you will share your findings with them. This creates pre-eminence again and gives you an excuse to contact your client base at least twice with some interesting and useful information.

15. Create mindmaps which summarise the main points of an article you read and send your database a copy of the full article and your summary so they can choose to read one or the other depending on their desire for a low or high level of detail.

Thanks for the great ideas, Mike!

By the way, Advocate Mortgage Corporation is a Sydney-based mortgage broker with a difference - their property finance consultants are also experienced solicitors, enabling them to offer “your loans and legals in one place”. Advocate Mortgage are specialists in first home loans and mortgage refinance.

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