heatmap, hot or not? Free alternatives for Crazy Egg
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August 25th, 2009
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16 Comments
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The heatmap is a graphical overlay of your website which points out what content is hot and what not. This is mainly done by tracking the mouseclicks of the visitor. A more expensive model uses eyetracking to achieve this overlay (for more informationon eye-tracking, visit the blog of Markus Weber). Although the results look the same, the two options are somewhat different. The click-heatmap makes it possible to analyse the clicking behaviour of the visitor while the eyetracking-heatmap shows you where people actual look on your webpage.
So what can you do with a heatmap? It gives you the opportunity to look through the eyes of your visitors as they navigate on your website. For example: The heatmap shows that your advertisement is easily overlooked. Possible reasons: wrong colour, close to big images which capture more attention, … Just give the ads a more prominent place and see if the visitors pick up on this. If you have dynamic content, it is a bit more difficult to take the full advantage of heatmaps (people click on different places if content changes). Instead of posting an article every day, you can consider doing so every week (or longer if you want to test longer).
I came up with this post because I was looking for an alternative for the site-overlay provided by google analytics. It’s not that this tool is useless, on the contrary, but the grass might be greener on the other side.
The first one I came across was Crazy Egg. A while ago this was a free service, but that’s not longer the case. They have various payment-options and if you have a look at the demo, you’ll notice that 9$ a month is not that much. If you prefer to have a free alternative for Crazy egg, you can just keep on reading…
A second heatmap is provided by Feng-Gui, which has a free service for simple heatmaps. Feng-Gui (so they claim) forsees human’s attention and attraction, simply by uploading a screenshot. This method doesn’t track any mouseclicks but the heatmap is generated by an algorithm, which is fabricated by the results of numerous neurologic studies. To make sure this algorithm stays intact, Feng-Gui compares the results with actual eye-tracking methods. Personally I think these results are based too much on assumptions instead of bulletproof evidence. Although the algorithm is constantly checked, changes can be made by the smallest detail. For example, what about people who read from right to left? They see your website completely different than you. One other point: you can only upload one screen shot every 5 hours when using the free version. Feng-Gui also comes as a firefox plugin.
If you are using wordpress, maybe you can have a look at this wordpress plugin as well. After installing and activating the plugin, it starts to register mouseclicks. It is possible to generate heatmaps for every page and with a handy datepicker you can easily go back in time. You can set the time limit and memory in the provided php. Although this plugin is a good way to get started with heatmaps it doesn’t offer the possibility to generate weekly/monthly summaries, which makes testing a bit difficult.
Another free heatmap comes from Labs Media and is called Clickheat. This open source application uses php and needs to be installed on your server. To make things easier, they developed Clickheat as a wordpress plugin as well. After several search strings into google I came across this article on heatmaps written by Matt Ridout and gave me some new insights of Labs Media. Apparently the plugin adds a little link into your webpages back to the website of Labs Media, which can conflict with some searchengines. It’s not difficult to remove the link, but I’m not really fond of this kind of strategy.
The next free trackingsystem is called “The definite heatmap” by Corunet and is a “do it yourself solution”. Corunet gives you the opportunity to build your own heatmap, this way you have a better understanding how these programs work. For the lazy people among us: you can download all necessary files at the end of the tuturial. I will give this a try later on and will let you know the outcome.
Although I’ve never used ClickDensity, I heard quiet a lot about this analytics tool. They offer a 30 day trail, in which you can fully test the functionalities. If people are using this package, please let me know. Because it got so many good reviews, I’ll be giving this tool a try as well.
As mentioned before, heatmaps are better used on static websites than dynamic ones. The content on dynamic website is often changed (e.g. new posts/comments on blogs), this in contrast with the coordinates of the recorded clicks made by the visitors. This shouldn’t be a problem if you update your blog/website monthly and attract a serious amount of visitors.
In this post I tried to make a small summery of really cheap or free heatmaps. Whatever your choice will be, you have to be carefull with heatmaps. Most of them make a connection with the help of Javascript (from the client-side) to the webserver for every click made by a certain visitor. This can interfere with the performance by slowing down the system. A possible solution is to activate the recording of clicks when a low number of people are visiting your website. You’ll have to test it over a longer period of time because of the sheer number of people, but at least they will enjoy your website at full speed.
If you have any experience with heatmaps (free or paid versions), please let me know.
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11:24 am on September 4th, 2009
Very accurate job!
Another solution to avoid performance issues, could be to have a separate server just for heatmap.
What do you think?
P.S.
I didn’t know CrazyEgg has got commercial, damn!
10:37 am on September 5th, 2009
If the cost-benefit ratio was ok, then this would be a great solution… but only for those websites which attract a lot of visitors. More visitors means more clicks to be recorded, so they would certainly benefit of a second server.
7:31 am on September 28th, 2009
great post, thanks kindly
8:37 am on September 28th, 2009
You’re welcome Dave!
8:36 pm on October 6th, 2009
This article has been shared on favSHARE.net. Go and vote it!
10:16 pm on October 15th, 2009
I am new to the world of web analytics and i think the functions are unbeleivable. I have an online private business and it has always been so frustrating to me how i could not observe the activity of my customers. I came accross ClickTale analytics on a similar blog and i tried out the free option offered and my eyes have been opened. I now feel confident to adjust my website according to the behaviour i can see in the videos and all the heatmaps. Its so simple and so effective, I wish i had found it earlier.
6:22 pm on November 9th, 2009
@Steve Mann: Thank you for the comment Steve. Since a few weeks now I’ve been testing ClickTale as well. I’ll let you know my findings as well.
11:02 am on November 17th, 2009
Hi, I found your page when i was searching Google for sites related to this article. I have tell you, your site is good. I like the design too, its nice. I don’t have the time at the moment to fully read your website but I have noted it and I also registered for your RSS feed. I will be back in a day or two. Thanks for a great website.
2:54 pm on November 17th, 2009
@ArticleDirectory: And thank you for the nice comment! Hopefully you like the rest of the website as well.
5:18 am on February 18th, 2010
Love the list thanks so much.
Regarding clickheat – I installed it on the checkout pages of a store to see how people used the page.
A while later the site owner complained that when he viewed the checkout pages he got the IE ‘this page contains secure and insecure content’ error, and he worried that this was reducing the conversion rate. I checked and checked and checked again, and I couldn’t find any non-https images.
Eventually I finally realised what was happening – it was the clickheat script that was the insecure content on the https page!
11:33 am on February 18th, 2010
@Stuart: Hi Stuart, nice to hear that you like this list and thanks for your interesting comment. I’ve been using Clickheat sporadically for a few months now (actually only used it to write this article and test it a bit) and I never crossed this IE error message before. The implemented code from Clickheat seems a bit aggressive and maybe a good thing to keep it out of the secure checkout pages. I can imagine that the CR dropped down a bit because of this message, but maybe you can switch to a less intrusive package.
Although I find Clickheat’s system interesting (follow the mousemovements of the visitor), I prefer to use A/B testing in checkout pages to increase the CR.