Fifty-six percent of readers who took our poll on desired WC sessions indicated they want to learn more about website traffic analysis: analytics. This is an excerpt of a post from one of WC’s sponsors regarding “heat maps,” a supplemental software to existing analytics. A link to the full article is available at the end of the excerpt.
“How far down do your website visitors scroll? Which images and headlines do they expect to be clickable? Where is the best place to insert a photo or button?
“Heat maps are visual representations of the relative popularity of your website’s elements; and they can answer these and other non-intuitive questions. As a small business owner or non-profit organization, you need to know where your website visitors are getting frustrated. You need to see the elements that are causing your visitors to hit the back button and you need to know where your visitors are clicking.
Web analytics software like Google Analytics can tell you how your visitors found your site; which pages of your site are most popular; how long your visitors spent on your site; where your visitors are geographically located in the world and more.
Although most web analytics software can give you the “numbers”, they cannot tell you which parts of your site visitors expect to be clickable. They cannot tell you exactly how far down a page your visitors scroll. Without this information, you don’t know whether your visitors ever saw your call to action; whether they value one image over another; or whether a specific field in a form is the culprit for that page’s peculiar bounce rate.”
