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The Ultimate Guide to Heatmap tools 7

                     A Heatmap in simple terms is a graph that displays user behaviour on a site .  Generally termed Web heatmaps , are used for displaying areas of a Web page most frequently scanned by visitors. It does so through tracking the visual clicks the HTML page receives and it shows up in hot and cold click zones . It’s not a common necessity every blog owner uses , but it’s for those who want to study in depth about the architecture and optimization of link & advertisement placement.

This is how a Heatmap looks like

Google Search Result Heatmap

              This is a fantastic tool , especially when you are excited to know the fetish of your blog readers when they visit your blog –  like the specific area they spend most of the time , the section that receives the most number of clicks etc .  Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This “heat map” illustrates the ideal placing on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.  That’s why some web-masters earn a lot even with not a quite descent traffic after tweaking ad locations while others fail to utilize their blogs properly .  Overall , to optimize and enhance your blog , a heatmap tool is a very cool and superb service to enhance blog/website sections and parts including it’s design and ads placements . And there are quite a few handful of sites offering these services .

              Here is the list of all these tools :

1] Click Density

       My favorite one ! Click Density is more and more of analytics and advanced tracking than a heatmap tool . As with other web analytics packages, you then paste this into the HTML for your website. You don’t need any javascript or HTML knowledge, and full instructions are provided.

              When a visitor then accesses your website, a small additional javascript file is automatically downloaded from the clickdensity server – this usually only happens once for their entire visit, and has no effect on their browsing experience. Offers Free as well as Pro services . Definitely this has to be the first tool you need to experiment with .

Link

2] ClickHeat

              ClickHeat is an open source project released under GPL licence by LabsMedia  and free of charge 😀 It requires Javascript on the client to track clicks, PHP and GD on the server to log clicks and generate the heatmap. It works on browser’s supporting Javascript (minimal requirements on Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Konqueror…)  . Supports either Linux or Windows

The thing that’s cool is the low logging activity – A very few function calls to log a click and therefore no fear of server load . Also the Screen sizes and browsers are logged, making possible the tracking of liquid CSS layouts .

Link

3] UserFly

              Provides instantaneous web user studies by recording user visits and letting you play them back to see every mouse movement, click, and form interaction. Compatible with Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari, and Opera, although there are some known issues with Safari . Easy to use and very user-friendly and it only takes not more than one minute to set up!

It has plenty of plans to choose from but the best one I suggest is the Free one 😛 which lets you study about 10 captures/month for Unlimited domains with the recordings being stored for 30 days .

Link

4] Cannoli

              Cannoli is one of the open source heatmap tool written in Ruby on Rails based on the Ruwa analytics . The main features are

  • Database used to save clicks
  • Heatmap can be generated per page
  • Statistics provided by Ruwa (visitor settings, referers and so on)
  • Fast Heamap generation in C++

HIghly recommended for Programmers and coders to try it out 😉

Link

5] AttentionWizard

              AttentionWizard too looks better choice and it uses advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to simulate human visual processing and attention. It creates an attention heatmap of your Web page instantly that predicts where someone would look during the first few seconds of their visit. This tool is more of a visual tracking tool than actual click tracking, so if you had a mock-up design, just send it to this tool and it will predict you how a pair of human eyes will move along the design elements.

By contrast, eye tracking and mouse tracking images tend to have more ghost-like halos that are simply the result of movements between the actual points of interest . Available as in Free as well as Paid pricing .

Link

6] Feng-Gui

              This is a heatmap tool although the name sounds very weird 😛 . Feng-GUI simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals, and creates heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at . It boast to Analyze Attention and Attraction in visuals.  It’s not free but minimum price starts from 5$ .

Link

7] Click Tale

              The second most famous and used tool on the Internet ! Claims to help web-masters analyze where visitors’ focus their attention . Has a very good clean webpage layout. Possess plenty of rich features as well as tremendous plans and pricing . The free plan can record 400 page views per month

Link

8] Crazy Egg

              And now this is the most famous and Craziest tool 🙂 with lots of cool features . Very easy to setup by adding just a few lines of codes . It is used by lots of popular blogs and this can tell how accurate this tools is .  Check how much attention a specific website area gets from your visitors  , content your visitors care about the most, what they read, and what they completely skip over.

       However the only problem is ,it’s not available free 🙁 and the cheapest basic plan starts from 9$ ! in which you can track only 10 pages but 10,000 visitors .

Link

              That’s all folks !

       I would suggest to add a heatmap script on your website once there comes a time to go more deeper inside blog pages and post with a strategic point of view with which you can easily identify landing page problems and Increase your conversion rates .

7 thoughts on “The Ultimate Guide to Heatmap tools

  1. Reply Kavita Nov 17,2010 11:12 am

    Good way to know about your blog traffic concentration spots on your blog. I do not remember which heatmap I used some days back to know about my site behaviour to visitors but Click density seems to be good tool

  2. Reply Rajan Balana Nov 17,2010 11:57 am

    Really Amazing Thanks for sharing 🙂

  3. Reply ielts Nov 17,2010 6:46 pm

    These are very good tool and I will sure use these in my professional career.

  4. Reply ryder88 Dec 8,2010 7:36 am

    Amazing tool to check your reader’s activity on your blog. I will try the crazy egg tool and see what happens. Thanks for this.

  5. Reply reehasmith@ louisvuittonreplicahandbags Mar 12,2011 12:50 pm

    great information about the heating tools …its quite a new an informative thing for me

  6. Reply Jamal@broccoli soup Aug 5,2011 7:04 am

    I will sure use heatmap tool for my product based site that is under construction.

  7. Reply Gary Ashton@Spring Hill short sale Oct 8,2011 1:32 pm

    HeatMap tool .. it looks quite interesting to me .. with the help of this tool I can do some significant changes in my site from which I can get better response from my visitors …
    Thanks a lot for sharing such valuable information …

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