Get Click Heatmaps for Your Website with ClickHeat

Kyle Judkins — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:18:11 +0000

Analytics are a great tool to use with any website or blog. They help you understand where your traffic comes from and some of the ways that traffic behaves. In the past, MakeUseOf has covered several free traffic analytics tools to track all of your site’s statistics. Today, I’m going to tell you more about a free heatmapping analytics tool.

ClickHeat is a free software that lets you see heatmaps of your website and all the pages in it. In order to make your content and design better, you need to know how your readers currently use your website. ClickHeat allows you to learn more about the behavior of your readers than basic analytics tools do.

What are heatmaps?

Heatmaps are a visual way of showing you the behavior of your readers. Think of it like the storm tracker you hear about all the time on the weather report. The darker areas in the storm tracker mean a much higher concentration of bad weather. The same rules apply to the view of your website. The traffic areas on your website will get various colored areas around them to show how many clicks that area receives with the higher traffic areas being denoted by much darker areas.

As you can see, the bubbles show where my readers were clicking. I do wish there was a little more red in the picture, but getting that many visitors will take some time.

Installation

The installation of ClickHeat can be a little challenging, but I’m going to provide you with a few tips that will make it much easier. The first thing you must do is upload the ClickHeat files to your website. Once that is complete, you need to go to http://www.yoursite.com/clickheat/index.php and follow the instructions to install ClickHeat.

Those steps were all fairly easy, but the part that gave me a challenge was applying the HTML code to the different parts of my blog. I tried to follow the instructions, but I was unable to get the code in the correct place after several tries. Finally, I just placed the code at the bottom of my pages. I started seeing results after I placed my code there, so I would recommend that you just start by putting your code there.

ClickHeat Options

One of the first settings you need to check when you install ClickHeat is the layout of your website. You need to let ClickHeat know if your website is liquid and how it is set up. Having a liquid website means that your website adjusts to the resolution of the person that is viewing the site. If your web design options aren’t put in properly, the heatmaps won’t make any sense, because ClickHeat can’t collect the data properly.

ClickHeat gives you several options when it comes to your heatmaps. You can find out which browser your users used or how people with different screen sizes used your website. The changing of screen size could be a great source of data if your website doesn’t display properly for certain resolutions. You can also change the transparency of the heatmaps in order to get the best view. Also, you can group your heatmaps by day, week or month.

Conclusion

ClickHeat won’t replace your traditional analytics tool, but it is a great way to quickly see how users and readers really use your website. It is easy to get lost in all the numbers of a tool like Google Analytics and not see the big picture. ClickHeat allows you to step back and look at how people use your site every day. This knowledge will help you determine better ways to catch readers’ attention or find new ways to display your content. I definitely think that anyone out there that is serious enough to check out their statistics should give ClickHeat a shot.

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5 Top Statistical Site Traffic Trackers

Wendy Limauge — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:01:53 +0000

If you want to create a successful blog or website, it is important to understand where traffic is coming from and what people do when they get there. There are a number of free tracking tools available to help you keep track of how many visitors are on your site right now, what site they came from, what keywords got them there, how long they stay, and other statistical data such as country, state, browser type, monitor resolution, and what operating system they use.

All of these traffic trackers are very easy to setup and offer a lot of help through FAQs and forums on their websites. Each one gives accurate, real-time website statistics with detailed visitor tracking, traffic analysis, and are free to use. Just pick the one that suits you and your site the best.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is the most unique site tracker available. Their system focuses on tracking visits and shows where a visitor clicks on the page using confetti view. This shows you the referring sites, a list view which shows you commonly used keywords (exportable as CSV), a heatmap which shows you areas that are “hot” on your site, and an overlay view which shows you popular areas on your site using color-coded buttons.

CrazyEgg helps you visualize your visitors instead of just seeing numbers. When you know where your visitors are clicking, you can fine-tune your site’s performance, change ad placements, and improve the overall productivity of your site.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is considered one of the most comprehensive website tracking tools available. It helps you find out what keywords you need to use to attract site visitors and it integrates with your Google AdWords account.

Google Analytics is easy to use for the beginner user and it has the capabilities that experienced web professionals want. Reports are available with very detailed information and custom reports are also available.

SiteMeter

SiteMeter offers a decent amount of free statistics that enables a typical blogger or website owner the basic understanding of the type of traffic they’re getting, where it is coming from, how long the visitor is staying, who is online now, and other things like amount of page views, browser used, computer type, and location.

SiteMeter only counts up to 100 visitors at a time then resets and starts counting again. You can set the privacy level so that you can view your statistics directly from the SiteMeter link on your site. Your site visitors will also be able to view your statistics or you can make them private.

One of the unique components of SiteMeter is the Traffic Estimator which looks at your former site traffic and will give you expected traffic estimates for the coming hour, day, week and month.

StatCounter

StatCounter evaluates the last 100 visitors which is enough information for the average site. It allows for an invisible counter installation which is important if you wish to include StatCounter code on your site without it interrupting the design of your site.

You can set the font size and color, the background color, and whether to display pageloads or unique visitors. To view your statistics you need to log into your account. The free account tracks up to 250,000 pageloads a month. Your statistics are available for download in Excel or CVS formats.

GoStats

Packed with lots of great features, GoStats has been providing a reliable web stats traffic counter service since 1999. This free hit counter is quick and easy to use but includes all of the features you need to keep track of your site traffic statistics.

It has the option to fully hide the counter or display as much web traffic data as you want, an account management control panel, site data updates by email, and a simple interface.

So those are just five options to choose from. Do you know of any others? Do you have a favourite you would like to recommend? Or does Google Analytics rule them all?