Note – This is the first article in a series about using data-driven methodologies to improve your site. Want to learn more about how data collection and testing can improve your bottom line? Contact me!
I need better statistics. Now.
As any serious Thesis blogger knows – good statistics matter. A lot.
The problem is, for most people, Google Analytics provides too much data to be useful. Do you know which visitor
Clickheat Overlay of http://thesisready.com/skins.
segment is your most profitable? Least profitable? Odds are that while you have Google Analytics (or something similar) installed, you aren’t getting very much actionable intelligence from it. Knowing your monthly page views is cool, and can be fun to brag about, but it doesn’t help you get more readers. It’s a symptom of something, not the cause.
Shortly after the relaunch of ThesisReady, I got fed up with not having enough usable data available to help me improve my site. I needed something that would be able to quickly tell me what I was doing right, and what I was doing wrong.
The first thing I looked into were things called “heat maps.” There are a ton of companies offering heat map data collection as a paid service, but before I committed to anything, I needed a free alternative to test. After all, at that time I had no idea if using heat mapping software to track clicks would lead to a better experience for my website visitors.
For the record, I was dead wrong about that initial assumption.
Using ClickHeat
The free software I ended up using is called ClickHeat. Installation only took a few minutes. All you have to do is upload the ClickHeat folder to your website’s root directory, and hook the java script code it gives you into the “wp_footer” hook via the custom_functions.php file. At that point you’re up and running. Easy enough.
Once the software is installed, you can visit http://yourdomain.com/clickheat to log in and look at your data.
Understanding the Data
ClickHeat overlay of footer widget.
After a few days, depending on the amount of traffic your website gets everyday, you’ll begin to get accurate maps of where, and how often, visitors are clicking on your site.
One of the most interesting things I’ve discovered so far is that the “More Skins” widget in the footer is getting a lot more clicks than I had assumed. As you can see from the screen shot, so far today there have been quite a number of clicks. Now that I know this area of my site gets a lot of attention, I can focus future tests there to find out how best to optimize that space.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Thanks for this tip.
I have 2 priorities, getting visitors to my sites… that’s why I run Thesis, and getting them to buy once they hit the site. Clickheat based on this post will be a helpful tool as we develop skins that turn visitors into sales leads.
{ 1 trackback }