Web Page Optimization Made Easy Part 2 – Visual Analytics

In Part One, we introduced you to the power of Google Analytics. If you were unfamiliar with Google’s platform before, you should have learned enough to help you get started leveraging web analytics on your own websites. In part 2 of our series on Web Page Optimization, we’re going to cover a few solutions which are much more visual and interactive.

These are tools that will help you pinpoint precise activity that’s happening in real time on your web page. Since these tools illustrate exactly how people are interacting with your website, we think these are some of the most exciting free tools available for web page optimization.

Google Analytics Site Overlay

If you hadn’t before and followed our previous entry, you may have installed Google Analytics on your own website. There’s a great feature that Google offers in its analytics suite called the Site Overlay. The site overlay is a type of Activity Tracking which places a transparent overlay on top of your website, and shows the number of clicks every link on a given page received. The site overlay tracks across every page of your website, allowing you to effectively “follow” your visitors across your page, by clicking through the most popular links yourself.

ClickHeat Heatmap Generator (Free!)

ClickHeat is a free heatmap visualization program that allows you to see each and every individual click on your website, whether the user clicked on a link or not, ClickHeat tracks the click and generates an easy to use HeatMap image for every page on your website. ClickHeat is very lightweight and easy to install. After you’ve downloaded ClickHeat, follow the instructions to install.

ClickHeat heatmap generated from our website – Variable8.com

The benefits of tracking every click, as opposed to tracking only clicks on links become apparent once you gather a few days worth of data and discover that visitors are more than likely clicking on elements in your page that weren’t intended to be clicked. Clicks are displayed as “hot” and “cold” areas, with areas of concentrated clicks glowing orange, and individual clicks registering as simple blue dots. This standard heatmap display allows you to quickly see what areas of your website are getting the most action, and which areas need improvement.

ClickHeat is a very valuable program for websites that experience heavy amounts of traffic, the more traffic you have, the more you’ll be able to sample and test. The developers of ClickHeat eventually want to integrate their software into Piwik Open Source Analytics, until then you can download it separately here: ClickHeat

Use Google Analytics + ClickHeat for a winning combination

In Google Analytics, find your page with the lowest bounce rate (numbers of visitors who leave without clicking), open ClickHeat and find the areas of the page that seem to attract the most attention, the “hottest” areas of the page, compare & contrast with your pages that are performing poorly and have a high bounce rate. Pay attention to for link placement, page titles, positions of graphics, or headlines that may be working better than others.

ClickTale Video Analytics (Premium)

ClickTale is an innovative tracking service that allows you to track visitors activity through an actual online video, which reproduces the exact movement of a visitor from the moment that they land on your web page. It tracks interesting metrics such as the places on a page the visitor scrolled to, form completion/abandonment rate, and has its own unique spin on Heatmaps. ClickTale is a premium application, recommended for webmasters who require heavy split-testing capability.

ClickTale introduces a different take on heatmap generation, by color coding the areas that visitors scroll to on your page, rather than tracking link clicks, you can discover what the “hottest” areas of focus on your page are. They have a free trial that lets you record up to 400 visitors per month, which is still enough videos to get valueable data for your website.

That ends our entry for Web Page Optimization Made Easy part 2. Look forward to part 3, where we’ll be teaching you more powerful methods of tracking visitors, click through rates, and provide tools that will help you conversion rates.