Click Heat is finally installed

Well, it's been a long time coming, months of negotiations with our IT department and we have finally had an instance of Click Heat installed to run on our external website. The idea of heat mapping came up in a post I made way back in January when we were originally looking at a paid for service to provide us with details. However, a very handy reply from Mike Nolan pointed us to the open source ClickHeat option instead and we now finally have it installed!

It's only a few weeks in but it's already highlighting some interesting trends on our page usage and has shown that we are still the first point of contact for our current students as well as prospective. The hottest spot on our homepage is to our VLE 'BREO'... This feedback will obviously help us when we look at re-shuffling the content on our pages and also highlights how we need to further promote our internal services to our current students.

I've dropped a screenshot of the Click Heat output below to show how visual the stats are, also a big bonus when trying to show why changes to page layouts are needed!

Click Heat output for the initial two weeks of running

Heatmapping... i'm warming up to the idea (sorry, had to be done!)

So, I finally found the time to follow up on the notes I took from the Precedent seminar a couple of weeks back... it' been a busy few weeks! Anyway, one of the links was to a company that provides heatmapping, essentially a cheaper way of eye tracking where users linger on your site by tracking their mouse movement.

This is potentially going to throw up some interesting discussions with out IT department about how useful the information would be. Admittedly it does appear that most people simply click on the links on the page however, the idea is that people track the areas on the page they are reading with their mouse. So, if the content is good and they have read it they should have also had their mouse hovering over that area... i'm still undecided on how accurate that assumption is though.

It will certainly throw up some heated discussion about the usefulness of the data but then with the cheapest package costing $9 a month for 10,000 tracked visits it's probably worth a trial for a couple of months to check out the results!