You may be wondering what the video you see above is.... Read on and you will find out. I guarantee you will be amazed.Analysis of your website's access and usage statistics are a fundamental part of any Internet Marketing strategy. If you can't compare yourself to some web analytics accurate, timely, and going well beyond the usual parameters, you will never be able to measure what you do as you0ve done it, you will never get a complete picture of the situation, and you risk continuing on the wrong path. The Heat Map represent one of the most advanced and intriguing tools I use and have been implementing lately in all major projects (including Valerio.it). Combined with other measurement tools, such as click tracking, and careful analysis from Google Analytics, I can get a very, very accurate picture of what readers are doing and how I can improve my website's conversion performance.
Web Analytics with Heat Maps
What are Heat Maps? Literally heat maps, they represent how users in general, but if you want any users in particular, interface with your online pages. With a color scheme and graphic representation borrowed from science, or rather thermography, they represent with color patches of varying intensity, from the coolest tones (blue) to the warmest tones (red), what your users are doing on your website. The warmer tones cover the areas that are most interesting to your reader, while the areas with cooler tones, are those that are less viewed, less clicked on, and therefore... less interesting.
Building on this principle, you can then analyze which areas of your pages are being watched, read, and clicked on, compared to others. Look at this image of the page who is valerioOf Valerio.it.
As you can see from this image, there are areas of different colors, and the ones where the user's eye stopped the longest are the areas tending to warmer colors. The eye follows the mouse, kind of like what happened in school when we were learning to read, with the finger you held the line. Do you remember that? Today more or less the same thing happens with the mouse. Of course, we don't use the mouse to follow and read everything, but the software I use has such an algorithm that it is able to check multiple parameters at once, including page scrolling, dwell times, clicks, mouse movement, and where the mouse is left to rest... In other words, by analyzing the behavior of each individual visitor, which is conceptually different from each other, but essentially similar, you are able to derive one of these valuable maps.
But it doesn't end there. I'm about to show you something incredible. Heat Map Tracker in fact it records in a movie, everything each visitor does on your site, in real time, storing each of these motions in your server, without taking up a lot of space thanks to an overlay system (in fact only the mouse is recorded, not the visitor's screen), and providing you with additional information about the origin, browser, screen size, clicks... Here is unveiled the clip you see shown at the top of this article.
What to do with the right web analytics
And now that we have all this information? You now have a very, very accurate picture of what is happening on your pages. For example, if the area where you've placed the newsletter registration form, is in a blue area, it means it's poorly viewed, so...move it! If you see that your users do a lot of page scrolling, it means that what they are looking for is not within reach! If there are few clicks, it means there is little interaction with your page! The difference between having and not having this information, can be vital. Heat Map Tracker also gives you a snapshot of your entire website, allowing you to see the top 10 pages, and much more.
Using Heat Map Tracker for Web Analytics
Heat Map Tracker is available for as low as $49 (depending on the number of websites you want to analyze) and is definitely a very competitive price. A very similar service I used a couple of years ago cost $199 per month per site! It runs on WordPress, installs in 2 minutes flat and is up and running immediately. I recommend you go to the site and watch the introduction movie.
FOR WEB ANALYTICS PROFESSIONALS
PRO
An amazing product that seems to catapult you a few years into the future. Aside from the incredible option that captures like a movie what others are doing on your website, it is able to show you after a few days, what the strengths and weaknesses of your website are. The price is definitely very low.
AGAINST
The only negative note is this: will you have time to take this measurement tool into account as well? If you are not the analytical type (but you should!) or if you have really little time to manage your online business, the risk is that you will run into information overload.
CONCLUSIONS
The tool is great, it installs in no time and starts monitoring your site right away. The information it gathers, if you have time to analyze it, is invaluable. One tip: If you are an agency or developer, evaluate the developer version, install Heat Map Tracker on your clients' sites and charge them for this service, perhaps adding a report with your considerations.