Freewaregenius’ clickmaps analysis
I recently used created clickmaps of my new Freewaregenius theme in order to shed light on what people were doing on my site. The results were very interesting to me and, I would imagine, they would be interesting to a lot of readers, especially those who have their own sites or blogs. I therefore created this post to share these clickmaps as well as some of the insights that came out of them.
Disclaimer: the tool used to create these clickmaps is not free, and therefore shall not be named. The original version of this posting did mention it but I have decided to remove it.
I will present two out of three clickmap options here: heamaps and confetti maps (which appear as little dots). I have decided not to post site overlay screenshots (little bars next to links that represent the amount of clicking activity). The confetti clickmaps are my favorite, as they can be really insightful, as are the heatmaps, but I don’t care much for site overlays (which are also supported in Google Analytics, btw, although generally speaking I would say the Google Analytics site overlays are crap).
The test:
- I looked at the Freewaregenius home page only
- Monitored 5001 visits which generated 1366 clicks on Jun 8th and 9th, 2009.
- Important note: the current version of the tool used is not able to record clicks on some flash and Javascript elements on the page. Thus it did not record clicks on the “Featured Article” widget on top of the page, or the carousel next to it. It is also unable to record clicks on Google ads, on flash videos, or the “random posts” section in the bottom.
The clickmaps: entire-site JPEGS are too long for me to display in this blog posting without making the clickmaps very difficult to read. Therefore I am showing results for (a) top of the page, (b) middle of the page, and (c) bottom of the page seperately.
Top of page images: see above
Bottom of the page:
Middle of page:
The findings: I’ll split these into three sections A/B/C
(A) Issues that I’d already suspected that the clickmaps confirmed:
- The searchbox on the top right is used heavily
- The numbered-page navigation near the bottom is used heavily
- The thumbnails (screenshots) in the first few postings are clicked heavily
- Thumbnails in general are clicked on heavily as the primary source of information, even in cases were the posts themselves are not clicked into.
- Posts that have a more general audience, such as games or email clients, get alot more clicks than specialized posts (such as WinCdEMu, which didn’t get clicked on one time during the test period).
(B) Insights that are new or that I wasn’t paying attention to:
- Users click and interact with the tabs in the header under the logo much more than I thought they did. I am glad to see some clicks on the Sitemap; I didn’t think anybody went there.
- Users click on the “Freeware Top 20″ tab like crazy.
- Posts near the top of the page and posts near the bottom are clicked on heavily. Posts in the middle are somewhat neglected or skipped over.
- The tabbed javascript widget in the sidebar (recent/most commended/recent comments), gets some good use, which is interesting to know.
- Browse by category: only 3 or 4 buttons in the black “browse by category” section are clicked on to any significant extent; Freewaregenius Picks, Games, and (possibly) Media players.
- “Click to read more”: the red link at the bottom of each posting is not clicked at all. Users prefer to click on the post title instead.
- Tag cloud: is very seldom clicked, although this may be due to its placement towards the end of the sidebar.
- Blogroll: the sites in my “favorite freeware sites” section are clicked on heavily. I am giving these guys some serious traffic.
- Lists in the footer: of the three lists in the footer (”Recent posts”, “Most commented”, and “Popular this month”), only the latter gets any clicks.
(C) My future plan of action:
- Making better use of the tabs in the header: I may add a second row of tabs and re-test to see how users react to that.
- Reducing the number of posts per page: given that the posts in the middle are generally overlooked, while the ones on top and bottom get clicked, I will reduce my current 13 posts per page to something that might reduce or eliminate the middle altogether.
- Freeware Top 20: I’ve decided to stop procrastinating and update the “Freeware Top 20″ already (hopefully by next week). I always knew this was a popular page that needed to be updated, but seeing all the clicks in the confetti map put it in better persepctive relative to everything else on the page.
- Category navigation: the fact that categories are so seldom clicked on support an idea that I’d been wanting to implement for a long time, which is to reduce the categorization scheme to 8 or so basic categories with no subcategories.
- Blogroll/links: I will be updating my link exchange policy pretty soon (unless your site is highly trafficked or has a high Google rank, I will not accept link exchanges. However I will give a link in exchange for contributing content to this site, but I haven’t figured out the details yet).
- Tag cloud: seems to be completely useless. Am considering either removing the tag cloud and not bothering with tags, or creating a limited set of tags that may reduce the tag clutter. Do tags have any SEO value? If you know please share in the comments.
- Lists in the footer: I will consider removing the “Recent posts”, and “Most commented” lists and replace them with something that may be more interesting to the readers, such as an “about this blog” section with my picture in it, and/or a poll or something of the sorts
.
I did similar test at my blog with ClickHeat – free but must be self-installed on server.
Got less insight, mostly because I have less stuff going on on page so everything was predictable with hot areas in top headlines, navigation and pagination.
Disabled it for now but plan using on future theme changes.
Google Analytics offers the site overlay view which allows you to view the “heat” by # of clicks on the page… The only downside is that it just uses link data so if you have two links that point to the same location on the page, it doesn’t know which one people clicked on.
Anyhow, it is “free” and very useful for traffic analysis.
I have decided to remove all reference to the tool used in creating these heatmaps because its not freeware. While in its previous incarnation I was being very clear and transparent on my relationship with the in-page analytics service used (was given free use of the tool in order to do this analysis, but was not an affiliate and did not get paid for any sales), I can understand that some readers did not see why this post was published on Freewaregenius.
The point of this post is to present interesting information that I myself would love to read if I found the article somewhere else. In other words you don’t need to actually RUN a clickmap tool on your own site to find a treasure trove of good insights in this article that you can apply to your site.
Well,
If there is full disclosure, which there was, what is the hassle?
While I am a regular reader, the insights are specific to website owners, I think. Didn’t get much out of it, but I can see how such a service can help optimise ROI. Which is time, at least,both Samers and ours, and I always like to say time is the most precious thing we actually have.
Most useful freeware ever found here:
My vote goes for Everything file search
When I have used this kind of service (CrazyEgg – free), another interesting thing I have discovered is that it can show you things like which word in a title the user actually clicked on.
For example in one of the images you can see the title:
“StorYbook: a Free and Open Source tool for Organizing a Novel”
Now, the whole title is one link, so a user could click anywhere and be taken to the post. However, the clicks were predominantly over the words “Open Source” and “Organizing”. The fact that it was “free”, a “tool” or to help with a “novel” did not seem to really spark the visitors’ interest.
Take away:
Your visitors are especially interested in “open source” and in the context of “organizing”. Perhaps you can find more tools that push these same buttons?
You would never have gotten this from something like Google Analytics that would have just told you that the visitors clicked on the link itself. You would never have known whether they we really interested in the above factors, or in the “novel” connection, or the fact it is “free” etc.
Do this regularly and you will get all kinds of clues about your users’ real interests, providing you with great prompts for new content.
Here’s an updated version of the heatmaps and layout articles I’d mirrored a few months ago. http://rapidshare.com/files/245464062/Scientific_Web_Design_-_23_Actionable_Lessons_from_Eye-Tracking_Studies.iso
I do not wanna hurt your feelings but what I felt, I wrote. You see, you did not follow your own rules. Whatever you mentioned that it is paid or not but you see the rules you set for yourself.
You can add one more category named something like Shareware Review or whatever you feel ok. Take care n best of luck. Do not worry, you did not washed out your one reader, me.
The reason I removed the reference to the service was because I pick my battles, and I chose not to fight this one. I got a $20 monthly subscription to use this service because I was going to write about it, and got people like you (Justone) lecturing me about principles and rules and google rankings (btw you have no idea what you’re talking about re: google’s seo practices). It simply wasn’t worth it. As far as I am concerned as long as I am offering this content (which takes me a lot of time and effort) for free I don’t owe you anything, and you have no right to talk to me about my supposed principles. Get a life.
But, sadly, now that the article doesn’t mention the service used, I am realizing that as far as the readers are concerned who are maybe interested in the service, it is difficult for them to know what the service is and where to go to get this implemented on their sites. Is this really better? Who has benefited exactly? Have I made this posting more valuable by removing references to the service? I think not.
So therefore I will swing back and announce that these clickmaps were done using a service called “CrazyEgg”. They used to have a free membership option which is no longer the case, but I have been informed that they will re-introduce a free membership option in August.
So there you have it.
This is brilliant self-data-mining in action!
Congrats!
@ I did not pick any battle. It is in your mind and now you wanna justify your deeds by attacking me through words. If you wanna this, I am ready. So, let people know that what is the matter. Show my first comment to all so they will know what has happened.
Ok! I accept that I am illiterate and ignorant person. Even being such person, I did not attack you at any moment. But people like you (samer) did not understand the things in simple words, if told. Look at your behavior and compare what I said and what you wrote.
Show my first comment and lets start your so called battle.
@Justone: I am not bringing back comments. “Pick my battles” is a figure of speech (see here). This subject is closed. I understand that you simply wrote down what you saw. Thanks for your contribution.
Keep in mind that this type of tracking looks at where people click, not where they are looking. Eyetracking, if it including temporal data, could be very useful but it’s also darn expensive.
As a suggestion, ignore more of Just One’s comments in the future. It’s far easily for a person to criticize than to build anything. I don’t care for the games that are mentioned but I don’t bitch. Just One doesn’t want the cafeteria method, he (she?) wants the slave chef method.
I’m glad you mentioned CrazyEgg. Come to think of it, I have a suggestion which might turn this lemon of a discussion into lemonade. Have you considered including a forum with limited post length that would be a way for people to ask for a program to do X? Maybe there should be a set of trusted visitors who help police it so “already answered in the blog” requests get moved into their own category. If it works, it might also help you find new things. DonationCoder seems to work this way.
Hi Samer. Thanks for your realy great site.
Just one thought on way so few people are using Category navigation and tag cloud. I think that the sidebar is a bit to cluttered. The caterogy navigation I use alot but the tag cloud I have never use before because I haven’t really notised it down there with al the other text. But now when I tryed it I think it’s great. Maybe the sidebar should be a bit “cleaner” so its easyer to navigate there? As I was saying, Just a thought.
Regards Stefan
(sorry for my English)
I thought this information from a high traffic site was pretty insightful. Thanks for sharing!
The instant I realized what this article was about I got a big guilty grin on my face, like i was a kid and was caught doing something naughty (but not terrible) by a spying parent.
A sort of ‘ah you caught me’ feeling hit me.
I don’t know why.
I suppose Freud would.
DON’T REMOVE THE TAG CLOUD!! LOL… I may be the only one using it, but I really, really like it all the same!!