Heat Maps What About Them And Where To Get Them

It doesn’t matter what website you’re looking at, every site online has something that naturally catches your attention. It could be a picture, a graphic, a video, there will be something that naturally stands out and gets your attention.

If you’re looking at turning your website into a source of revenue you want your ads or products displayed in such a way that they grab your visitor’s attention. There are two ways you can go about doing this, the wrong way which is to force your ads on people which will drive them away from your site. Or using heat maps to attract your visitors to them without forcing them.

What’s a heat map?

Heat maps are programs that collect data on your website or blog. This data is collected and presented to you in the form of a chart that displays where your visitors are looking and clicking.

2 Examples of heat maps. The one on the right is a classic heat map showing you where you should and shouldn't display advertisements on your site

Why you want to use a heat map

Using a heat map has a lot of advantages, and like any other SEO tool can give you a better look into how your site performs, and what people think of it. Some of the advantages to using a heat map are:

1. You can see exactly what areas are getting the most clicks and attention. Many heat maps will even break it down further by showing you what individual words are being clicked in those links. For example if you have a links like “used cars for sale” even though that link might get a lot of attention the word “cars” might get the most clicks in that link. This allows you to fine tune results to be more appealing to your visitors.

2. You can spot areas that are performing poorly and make adjustments to your site’s layout. If you have an ad for example that doesn’t get any clicks you can remove it or move it to a more prominent spot without having to clutter up your pages or content.

Heat maps are programs that collect data on your website or blog. This data is collected and presented to you in the form of a chart that displays where your visitors are looking and clicking.

The Golden Triangle

Heat maps aren’t just useful for individual websites; they can also help play a role in search results. These sweet spots are referred to as “The Golden Triangle”. Using a heat map for search results can also help which paid listings get the most traffic as well.

Heat maps where to get them

If you want a heat map to use on your site here are a few listed below. Some of these are free, others you have to pay to use.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is probably one of the best known heat map analytics sites out there. This used to be a free service but now have basic rates starting at $9 a month.

Feng-Gui

This one doesn’t track mouse clicks, instead it uses an algorithm and neurological studies and mumbo jumbo that tries to predict where people will be drawn to your site. They have a free version where you can only upload 1 screen shot every 5 hours

Click Heat

Click Heat is a free open source software. It uses a php and needs to be installed on your server. If you’re a Wordpress user they also have a plugin as well.

Click Density

This site offers a free 30 day trial that allows you to fully test its functions.

Mouseflow

Mouseflow not only offers a mouse click heat map but it also tracks mouse movement and scrolling. They also offer analytics similar to Google’s.