Optimize Your Site with Heat Maps

Have you ever wondered where people are clicking on your site? Most tracking tools will tell you where in your site people are going but they don’t tell you exactly which link they clicked on. That’s where CrazyEgg comes into play. Basically all you have to do is put a little script down at the bottom of your page and CrazyEgg will give you a heat map showing you exactly where on the page people are clicking on things.

Some of you may wonder why or how this could even be helpful. This is very useful if you’re playing with different layout of pages to see which layout is more effective for drawing attention. Let me give you two examples:

Example 1: Ads. Whether its AdSense or banner ads, you want to put them in the best location to draw clicks. So how do you know where to put them? Are all locations the same? Definitely not! Google themselves have provided us with a guide that shows where the best places are to put advertisements. So use this information for your initial placement, but then watch the heat map on your own site to see which location really is drawing the most attention.

Example 2: Product Placement. If you have a product to sell, then of course you want to get that product in front of as many people as you can. This is why on the home page you’ll want to have some type of a ‘Featured Product’ or sale area. But again, where should it be? How do you know which one is getting the most clicks? Well, rather than just seeing which one gets more sales let’s also see which one gets more views!

So, I hope from these two examples you can see how using a heat map on your site really can be beneficial. CrazyEgg has a free version and a paid version, it just depends on how many pages in your website you want to track.

NOTE: For those of you using SiteCreatorPlus or some other Website Dynamics Builder (GoldPhoria, CityMax, etc.) this program doesn’t always recognize your site. Once I figure out a standard trick to get it to work from those sites I’ll let you know!

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