CYBERSPACE — Most webmasters religiously track click-throughs, joins and other statistics. They massage their sites’ appearance by rolling out dueling designs to see which works better at converting lookers into buyers. They create innumerable marketing materials and doorway pages in order to tempt the reluctant.A relatively new weapon in the arsenal is worth investigating. “Heat maps” can help webmasters determine where users click on their pages, whether or not the webmaster thinks they should be clicking there.
Unlike more traditional site overlays that reveal link popularity, heat maps reveal wasted space: areas that draw clicks but aren’t used for linking. For example, although users are much more likely to click on an image than the title or description below it, webmasters don’t always remember to link both the image and the text to whatever they’re promoting. Similarly, some text that begs clicks — say a phrase mentioning a subsection of the site buried within a sentence about how many wonderful things the site contains — often doesn’t link to anything.
Except in blogs, headlines, too, often are neglected. Here’s the bottom line about that: If your site contains a headline directing attention to “What’s New,” users expect the headline itself to link to a place where they can find more information. (That’s in addition, of course, to the expectation that every item below the headline links to something new and of interest.) Don’t simply install a section heading that reads “Best-Selling Vibes” with a linked list of bestsellers below it, for example. Also link the header to something — perhaps a page containing a “vibrator hall of fame.”
Perhaps promotional blurbs are the most often neglected. For example, if your site proclaims itself “the best place on the Net to find real amateur toe-sucking, phrenology and hot Tarot readings,” “toe-sucking,” “phrenology” and “Tarot readings” should link to examples of the content the site offers.
This type of overlooked click-bonanza can be revealed by heat maps, which track the well-intentioned but ineffective clicks users make. There are a plethora of tools on the Web for heat-mapping. A Google search for “heat map software” returned more than three million hits. “Heat map tool” returned 2.6 million.
Two heat-mapping products worth checking out are LabsMedia’s ClickHeat (LabsMedia.com/clickheat/) and CrazyEgg’s Heatmap (CrazyEgg.com). Although ClickHeat is not the most robust application in the cybersphere, it is freeware and open-source, making it affordable and user-friendly for those who are curious about what heat-mapping may reveal. CrazyEgg (CrazyEgg.com) provides a suite of services to help webmasters refine their sites, for a fee.
