Here’s a nifty tool from a company called crazyegg. It’s a utility that will track user activity with a little bit of javascript on your specified webpages and will create some nice tracking information. I’m particularly interested in the heatmap it’s supposed to generate so I can see graphically which areas of my pages get the most clicks. I’ve currently got it running on:

http://www.firmscode.com/index.php
http://www.itintl.com/index.php
http://www.1km1kt.net/index.php

Just view the source code and search for “crazyegg” on the page to see the javascript.

No results yet, but I’ll post some images as soon as they come back. Here’s an example from their site.

Update

I’ve gotten my first heatmap back for 1km1kt.net and WOW am I impressed! The detail it gave me is nothing new – I’ve always known where my clicks were going and what my visitors were doing from my reports, but I’ve never seen it laid out like this before. I’m a visual learner, so seeing a graphical representation like this immediately got me thinking of ways to improve the site. Here’s what’s come back in the past hour or so:

Off the top of my head, here are my initial thoughts:

• My ads are in the right place. They get the majority of the clicks already, so I’m not going to move them.
• Game titles are having an effect on click throughs – I need to let the site authors know that so they can maximize their traffic.
• Crazyegg is tracking not only what gets clicked on, but the exact spot the user is clicking. See that one on the EVE Online banner at the bottom of the “V”? That’s me.
• Lots of people are clicking on the “Free RPGs” link at the top of the page. I need to check on that page to make sure it’s got a good design.

I’m sure there’s more I can get out of this as it develops, but for a start that’s pretty good.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 12:17 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.