I've just been shopping around for a Heat Map tracking software and stumbled upon those two, which looks good to me:
CrazyEgg (I think Rand already talked about it), which is simple, easy to use and cost between 0,33$ - 0,80$ / 1 000 visits. I am not sure how deep the metrics are behind it. Has any of you tried it? It is worth it?
ClickDensity is the other one I found and seemed to offer wider and more detailed statistics. Setup seems to be a breeze. Costs seem lower per 1 000's.. They offer some nice A/B test splitting, allowing you to change snippets of html code as you like to compare conversions.
Deep down, my question is: is heat map tracking really going to help me? Is any of you using a similar product and discovered great insights with it? Thanks for any feedback!
My company uses Omniture's ClickMap, which is an add-on product for their SiteCatalyst analytics suite. Not a bad product but then again, there's not that many options on the market to compare with!
Tracking clicks is fantastic for both usability and conversion tracking.
With heat map tracking you can easily identify leakage points on a page and test the optimal placement of elements. For a recent and deceptively simple example, on one automotive site we found the call-to-action form that the site's business model depended on was being largely neglected.
ClickMap identified that the car dealers's profile was being clicked on extensively, so we reduced its prominence to below-the-fold and changed the wording on the CTA form from "Contact dealer here" to "Click here for more information on {insert car name}"
We also changed the car dealer's contact information (phone, address) to be slightly less prominent (color theme and positioning) and voila, with these simple tweaks email enquiries to dealerships increased by almost 40%.
In other words, ClickMap showed that users were navigating through the site, but because some saw the dealer's phone number or clicked through to the dealer's own site, a proportion of their leads were being diverted to other channels. Because of these findings, the site also implemented a call center to track outgoing calls to dealers, thereby creating an additional lead generation channel that could be attributed back to the site.
We still do 'traditional' usability testing (grabbing a sample of users & recording their site behavior with a digicam), but the hard data from a heat map can also be very illuminating.
Shor - I think you're getting my vote for adding the most to the blog with your comments. Thanks for sharing the experiences - we've got several clients running Omniture, but no one has shelled out for the clickmap add-on. It's impressive to hear about it in action.
BTW - What's your company, if you can share?
Great commentary on real life usage. Thanks.
I've read about and seen CrazyEgg (heard a lot of good about it), but haven't used any heat map software. But, I too am looking for a good heat map tracking software or service. If you do end up going with one of those two (or find another solution), please let us know about your experience.
Very cool - thanks for a great post and comments from other users with their feedback. This has been very valuable, saved me hours of googling! Cheers Shane
I've used the clicktale free trial. Seems quite promising, but the free trial is too limited. I need to track at least 2 pages at once and more than just a hundred visitors a month.
I think this heat map business is an amazing new development for copywriting. Back in the direct mail days great copywriters like Gary Halbert had no way of finding out which section of their copy was letting them down. Now we have access to technology that can take copywriting to a new level. I think I might go for the Crazy Egg basic package to begin with. It's very cheap, going at $9 per month.
Haven't tried either, but met the guys from Crazy Egg in San Jose earlier in the year. They hadn't devoloped the tool then. I'm going to test it soon. Seem like the kind of people that would give you a free trial.
I think this kind of tools will have a considerable impact on how our customers will work with web analytics - extremely spoken the can get a lot of understanding of their user behaviour visually - without any numbers. It's a kind of smart statistics.
I tried ClickDensity and it seems to be a very useful tool.
Also check ClickTale when it's available - they claim to produce even movies of user behaviour.
I like Clicktracks Navigator View. Not only can you see what people are clicking but you can split the stats into different traffic sources.
I would go broke in a hurry paying the rates on some of these heat map studies. I think that the click data is more valuable and partitions your users any way that you want.
I was recently approached by someone trying to sell Tealeaf's application, which is suppose to be able to replay a visitor's mouse movements and clicks.
I can't recommend it becuase i haven't used it, but it sounds interesting.
https://www.tealeaf.com/
j.
I would imagine it would be quite resource hungry.
The thing to note is that these software offer click-maps and not heat-maps in the ocular-tracking sense.
Technically the same data is available from Google Analytics with page-overlays. The problems start to arise when you have multiple links to the same resource - then you need to tag references individually.
Interesting and useful all the same.
Which is exactly why - technically - the same data isn't available in Google Analytics! In clickdensity (and I assume crazy egg), we're working off x/y positions of clicks (well, that's the simplified version, anyway), not the target of the link, hence you don't need to re-code multiple links to the same resource. Google Analytics doesn't track the exact position of clicks; so although it does give some useful data in the overlay, it's quite different to analysing exactly where the clicks occured. Plus, combine that with unique metrics like 'click time' (how long it took them to click where they did), and these products really start to become different tools to Google Analytics (i.e. usability vs statistics).
Thanks for the mention, by the way!
Actually, the ClickTracks and Google Analytics solutions aren't quite the same. The way CrazyEgg and other "true" clicktracking services work is by overlaying a grid of transparent 1x1 pixels and tracking actual clicks. CT, GA, and I would assume SiteCatalyst only track movement from page to page.
For example, one of my clients experimented with CrazyEgg and found that on one of their pages, they had listed out three steps to opening an account. CrazyEgg showed that people were clicking on the 1, 2 and 3 icons trying to go to those steps. Because they weren't actual links, CT/GA would never show that (and didn't).
So it begs the questions, should those be links or not? The user obviously wants them to be.
Services like these are great for usability and design information, but I wouldn't use them to try to find any new marketing information.
EDIT: Yeah, what Dan said :) Also, I don't pretend to know how exactly the software works, so the 1x1 pixel grid is just and easy way to understand it.
It isn't heat map tracking, or at least they don't call it that, but https://www.tealeaf.com/ offers tools that can track every click on a site, and do a lot of interesting things. I have no affiliation with the company, just heard positive things about their application while speaking with the user interface department of a large online insurance company.