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.