Improve your website through heat maps from CrazyEgg
Advantages of heat maps
Heat maps are an excellent tool to trace activities and behavior of an individual on a webpage. Heat maps are precise in their functions. You can actually see for yourself that how does people look at your webpage. You can closely monitor the reactions of the traffic visiting your webpage.
A common example is that of the report by Eyetrack 3 group. They claim that top most left corner of your webpage is investigated first and that the visitors are more interested in reading headlines.
Clicks may not be eyes but they are capable of curing “blindness”
Though we cannot read the minds of the visitors but we can surely map their likes and dislikes through mouse clicks. CrazyEgg records all mouse clicks by all visitors and generates a suitable heat map. The heat map is very useful in determining the preferences of the users and hence you can alter your site accordingly to make it better.
Do more of showing than telling
Many websites have benefited from CrazyEgg. One of the most important lessons from CrazyEgg is that you need to showcase your product in the most unique way than to talk about them. This observation has been concluded from extensive research on the heat maps of various companies. Several myths were busted and companies learnt that products get sold if they are attractive to look at.
Squeeze the menu
The next lesson learnt from the heat maps is that visitors are mostly interested in tags like demos, features and licensing. Visitors are generally interested in seeing the programs getting executed and also to find the price of the products. Such tags and links are repeated on other pages and essentially on the main page of the website.
No one wants to go through a half an hour video termed as demo. Thus measures should be taken to keep people interested.
Lastly, people interact with the side bar menu. There was confusion over this feature with people not responding in a systematic manner on the side bar menu. But the latest design is effective and seems to work.
Superior click areas
CrazyEgg allows you to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate clicks. On comparing the clicks we conclude that some areas of the website are interesting but not “clickable”. Thus these areas need to be improved thoroughly. People tend to click not only on links but also on non hyperlinked images, texts and even blank spaces. Thus every inch of the available space is important.
Sieve the noise
One interesting lesson is that you should not hyperlink the most clicked areas. You can never determine the actual behavior of the numerous visitors and hence such areas are passed on as “noise” which is not at all actionable.
The disadvantages of Crazyegg
Not all of my experience with Crazyegg was positive. The gripes:
- The website takes longer time to download if CrazyEgg is attached to it.
- CrazyEgg has a slow management interface. Sometimes pages do not get loaded and if they do then sometimes it may take longer time.
- Heat map is rendered useless if you have any dynamic content in your website. Thus its application is limited to some extent.
The advantages of using CrazyEgg outweigh the disadvantages and hence CrazyEgg is the best option available to you.
