Wouldn’t it be great if you could see exactly what links your website visitors were clicking on. With that kind of information, you’d have a better understanding of exactly what your audience is interested in and what areas of your webpages attract the greatest number of clicks. All very valuable information if you want to increase the number of clicks you get on certain links or if you want to know what content interests visitors so you can provide them with more.
You may have already seen the AdSense placement heatmap produced by Google and I’ve found it to be very useful in determining the most profitable ad placements. Imagine if you could have a similar heatmap for your own webpages…
Well, now you can take the guesswork out of placement testing…
Crazy Egg offer a service that plugs right into your existing webpages, quietly tracking each and every click on a link your visitors make. To get started, a small piece of JavaScript is added to the bottom of any webpage you wish to track. Then you just sit back and wait for the clicks.
When you log into your Crazy Egg account, you have the option of viewing your voyeured webpages overlaid by a heatmap or have indicators on links giving you exact click counts.
Here are some examples of the kind of heatmaps you’ll see:
As you can see, not only do the heatmaps give you an indication of which links on your pages get the most clicks, but they’re precise enough to reveal exactly where the links are clicked.
If your page content changes then the heatmaps adjust themselves automatically so you’re not misinformed by rearranging links around your pages.
You can sign up for a trial account and track up to 5,000 visits (per month) over 4 pages for free. Upgraded accounts get a greater visit allowance, no limit on the number of pages tracked and real-time click reporting. This is another one of those tools that pulls you into checking at regular intervals so real-time reporting is definitely worth having if you’re the impatient type.
There’s a very prominent “REPORT A BUG” link at the top of each page at CrazyEgg.com for a good reason. I’ve found that pages sometimes fail to load completely or just slowly, but it’s not a major issue as I’m still using a free account. However, I had experienced some slow loading of tracked pages, which can mean a detrimental effect on your website visitor’s experience. Something to look out for if you’re going to give the service a try.
This is a very nice implementation of such a tracking tool and it clearly has some very real benefits to offer any website. I’m sure that as the paid service becomes more popular, Crazy Egg will be able to reinvest in some infrastructure upgrades and provide a more transparent tracking service.
Definitely worth a try, I say!
Technorati Tags: Crazy Egg, Click Tracking, Click Tracking Service, Click Heatmaps, Webpage Heatmaps
Here’s another sample of a heatmap from a recent post I made.