If you’ve been visiting SiteFever for more than a couple days, you should already know that I am totally obsessed with statistics, charts and reports. I believe that I owe much of the success of this blog so far to my keeping track of visitor trends and responding to them as I feel appropriate.
A few days ago I decided to use CrazyEgg.com to keep track of the click activity on my homepage. Here’s what the report shows after 1,000 visitors:
This first image is what CrazyEgg calls a “heatmap”. It’s like a thermal camera tracking the “hotspots” on your webpage. The colors change depending on how many clicks a particular spot receives.
This second image is of the same report, only it specifically shows you the exact location of each click on the page, and who clicked there. As you can see, the top banner, RSS buttons, navigation menu and macewan.org’s banner seem to be the most active.
What makes reports such as these so useful? Well, you can visually track which links and banners on your site are receiving the most clicks. One thing I found interesting in my report is that although the entire 468×60 banner at the top of the site links to the same page, there seems to be a cluster of clicks over the small part that says “click here”. Proof that what I said before about telling people what to do with a “call to action” actually works!
Speaking of that banner, you might have already noticed the counter in the right hand column. It’s counting down exactly how much time remains to bid on my banner for one month. So far, the top bid sits at an even $100. I wonder who will win SiteFever’s first auctioned ad space???
You can create a free account with CrazyEgg.com that will allow you to track a few thousand visitors per month and create reports such as the one I just did. Why not give it a try and let us know how it went?
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Article posted by: Neon on September 17th, 2007
Does it track just the home page or all other pages as well?
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It’s funny how this service has been around for a few months now but bloggers are only starting to know about it. I have written a post about this a couple or so months ago and it’s finally starting to get around. Anyway, nice post!
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Well I was just thinking about this after reading that report by Alvin Phang on his Atomic Blogging review by JC, wondering how he tracked those hotspots. Great coincidence that you posted this discussing how it can be done. Thanks for that, John. Will be checking it out.
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Good article John. I love your screen shots. I also blogged about Crazy Egg about 2 weeks ago and I love to see these little heat maps.
Monika
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I’ve been looking into this, but each time I do visit crazy egg the site is so slow for me. I’ll check into it more because it looks like a lot of fun to see your site in this way.
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I stopped using crazy egg last year some time. I found it added too much lag to my site.
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Great tip. It’s easy to see how this could provide more information than just something like Google Analytics, with your example of where people clicked on the banner. This would be a great tool for experimenting with different buttons, ads, ad locations, etc.
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[…] You can create a free account with CrazyEgg.com that will allow you to track a few thousand visitors per month and create reports such as the one I just did. Why not give it a try and let us know how it went? Add your comment! […]
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[…] You can create a free account with CrazyEgg.com that will allow you to track a few thousand visitors per month and create reports such as the one I just did. Why not give it a try and let us know how it went? Add your comment! […]
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