Nice Heatmaps for Wordpress Blogs

Knowtebook — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:25:16 +0000

This little plugin will store each click made on pages of your site in a database, and from there, you’ll be able to go to your blog’s admin section and view the various pages. See what is popular with your visitors and what’s not. It’s had some interesting results on the sites he had run it on so far, and wanted to share it for people to download and play around with, said Roger Stringer.

For anyone who is wondering about the advantages of clickmaps, clickmaps let you see your site from a usability perspective. Your clickmaps show literally every click a user makes on a particular page. Every click is loaded into the database and over time a visual representation of collective clicks gives you an overview of the hotspots on the page.

8 Heatmap Tools and Why / How to use them

Knowtebook — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:17:57 +0000

Heatmaps visualize the stream of visitors on your website - showing hot and cold click zones. They provide an overall view of the activity and helps you to see every mouse movement and every click. It will improve web usability, conversions and revenue. In this post you will learn where you can find free services or tools, how and why you should use them.

Updates (+1):

2nd september 2008: added phpmyVisites

Reasons to use heatmaps

See, where people don’t click and why. It helps to…
Optimize landing pages
Optimize link & advert placement
Minimize shopping cart abandonment
Maximize conversions of online forms
Predict how visitors will use your site in the future.
Simplify web usability testing
Short: Find problems and fix them to boost your web project!

How to understand and use heatmaps

As an example we will take a look at PatioSigns.com. A heatmap overlay on the right shows the pattern of user behavior for the sample page on left. If you don’t know what all these different colors mean, don’t worry, we will explain it below.

Colors

As you can guess by naming in heatmap, the colors show the density of userclicks. Cooler colors such as blue and green get less clicks. Warmer colors get the most clicks.

The color key references the amount of participants whose eyes fixated on certain parts of the page. The red/orange/yellow areas are where the larger amount of the groupd looked most. The dark blue areas are where they looked least (Source: Poynter Online).

The red/orange color indivates that almost all subjects halted their gaze at that part of the page for at least a fraction of a second.

The yellow color indicates that more than half of all subjects haltered their gaze the part of the page for at least a fraction of a second.

Sometimes there is more used as colors to visualize the userstream. Crosses are used to represent a mouse click. A horizontal dotted line can represent where the page breaks on the computer screen. A red horizontal line can indicate how far down users scrolled before leaving the page.

Get on it and analyse

This isn’t as boring as it sounds. It is the most important and interesting part of analysis as I think, because it makes me breath faster if I see why people miss to click or do not see things I want them to see. I found a good walk through and what you keep in mind as you analyse.

Heatmap Tools and Services

Clickheat

A really good open-source tool which you can install on your server. No fees, full control!

Crazy Egg

A easy to use interface with nice effects like the confetti effect, a special kind of visualisation. There is a free plan, but you probably need to upgrade if you have more than 5.000 visits per month.

FuseStats

Free, simple, and effective way to manage and anaylize your website statistics. It inlcudes a easy-to-use HeatMapping technology that can be used on every page of your site.

Clickdensity

Real-time visitor tracking with different price plans (free for a small website).

phpmyVisites

A free and powerful open source (GNU/GPL) software for websites statistics and audience measurements including heatmaps.

Feng-GUI

Awesome online tool. Just upload a picture of a website up to 5MB and it will create a heatmap based on data collected on other websites.

Demo:

Wordpress Heatmap Plugin

Provides you with three new template tags for displaying a heat map in Wordpress (V. 2.3 or newer). It is similar to colored cloud tags.

Conversionstats

A professional conversion tracking tool that enables you to get heatmaps as well. Prices start at $29.

Corunet. El blog

This is more for geeks. If you want to know how to make your own heatmap service, follow davids article. You can download the final code at the end of the tutorial.

At the end

I hope to have helped you to understand heatmaps and that your can improve your site or revenue. If you want to stay updated about more posts of this kind, why not subscribing to Knowtebook and get all information right in time?

Analytics: Piwik - open source web analytics

Knowtebook — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:03:50 +0000

Piwik is a serious alternative to Google analytics. It gives interesting reports on your website visitors, your popular pages, the search engines keywords they used, the language they speak… and so much more. Get the demo.

piwik is different from the competition because:

the features are built inside plugins: you can add new features and remove the ones you don’t need. If you are a developer, you can easily build your own plugins!
you own your data. Piwik being installed on your server, the data is stored in your own database and you can get all the statistics using open APIs (publishing the data in many formats: xml, json, php, csv)
the user interface is fully customizable, you can drag and drop the widgets you want to display, create the reports you want

KnowTeBook - Webworkers Daily Milk » analytics