In today’s modern day internet the methods of tracking user trends and tendencies can be vitally useful to webmasters. To remain competitive they are no longer a luxury but rather a necessity. Let’s face it , the chances of a user emailing you back with a list of things they disliked are slim to none unless you have a poll somewhere on your site.

In specific I’m going to talk about heat maps.

Personally I believe numerical statistics such as Google Analytics and Mint statistics can be helpful to a certain extent and they do a great job reporting statistics such as unique visitors but unfortunately the numbers they spit out just don’t help you in the long run.

I mean to say they do not describe and tell the whole story of how your visitor reacts to your site. These factors of measurement I believe transcend conventional number statistics.

In specific where do visitors click , how far down do they scroll down , and how long they would keep your website open while browsing. You should ask yourself more important questions such as the following ;

• Which areas are ignored ?
• Which areas are hot-spots ?
• Do people even know I have a footer ?
• Why are people clicking areas that are not even clickable ?

1) Get Started , Download Open-source script Heat Map.

Do yourself the favor and download/register at this great website. [Click Here] I forgot to mention it’s completely free !

After you install the scripts (It’ll take a day or two depending on the amount of traffic you receive to receive sufficient & accurate user trends reports) certain analyizations will vary. If your on a free hosting server , you probably will not have the proper resources to run this script as it chews up a lot while your using it. If your on a paid server like myself you should be in the clear to use the statistic heat map script.

2) Which areas are ignored ?

If areas such as your featured article or advertisement aren’t even being clicked then I think we have a major problem. Advertisement heat maps (I will be using the one given by google as an reference to my inferences) suggest that the best spots to advertise anything , ads , content , video whatever it is you want focus on. You will get the most potential for making money from the following areas;

1. The header
2. The Top left area
3. Just above the actual content
4. Lastly the Section just under the content where your article ends.

These are all the spots that you should focus on.

3) Which areas are hotspots ?

Usually the hotspots of your website will be a few areas from my own personal experiences from running 5 websites. It will mainly be the Header , Home Page news section and images. People love to be stimulated by visual candy. In most cases if your news / topics are supplemented by visual candy then you can expect a boost in traffic.

Other reasons as to why certain parts of a website are hotspots is difficult to explain. In some cases it depends on your target audience. If you’re running a tech blog and only talk about computers you may want to reconsider your focus, if there are a lot of clicks coming from your Cell Phone section you may want to consider writing more things related to the cell phone industry.

4) Colors ?

Finally colors. Colors ? Yes colors ! Colors are the most powerful thing you can use to drive your content to push your website , it is colors and the proper choice of a scheme that will drive the clicks.

Colors are so so powerful on the sub conscience level that , I’m gonna use an analogy here ;

basically your visitors will decide within the first 3 seconds if they will get in bed with you.

5) Why do people click so much on areas that aren’t clickable ?

If you have a picture of something interesting and it’s not linked to anything , then here’s a wild idea link it to something interesting ! If not your users may not like your site and leave thinking it’s user-un-friendly.

If this applies to your main home page where you post news daily and there are pictures within the excerpt make an attempt to link them to your article. Your users will thank you big time for this. I’ve done this myself recently adding the plugin “Image Linked” and I haven’t looked back once.

This is an example of the front-page HeatMap for Sherifabdou.com ;

Traffic page views actually went up on average 40% in a 3 week time-period.

More Personal Note

ASK ASK ASK, not Jeeves but your own friends!

Ask them to be brutally honest or pretend that it isn’t your website and ask their opinions, also ask if they would come back to it as a returning user. I do this all the time while designing. It produces results in the form of valuable critiques.

But as of late I’m also double checking my work with what I like to call color calculator. Sure it may be a bit scientific but if the colors match and contrast perfectly then I say it’s a designer’s ace in the deck. If you follow the new trends of user tracking then you can maximize your potential for making maximum profit and driving traffic to your website.

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