ClickTale is a service that has been in private beta for a while, and they now have a blog post explaining their Heatmaps service.
CrazyEgg is a well-known player in this field, but ClickTale focuses more on the attention users give and where they scroll opposed to CrazyEgg which focuses more on clicks.
Essentially, you put some javascript code at the top and bottom of your page, and you are then able to get a few different pieces of data and heatmaps from Clicktale. The different types of Heatmaps are:
- Attention Heatmap shows how much attention a specific webpage area is getting from the visitors who visited that area, as measured by average time.
- Total Time Heatmap shows the total time that all visitors were exposed to a specific webpage area.
- Visitors Heatmap shows the number of visitors and the percent of all visitors that looked at every area including the page bottom.
- Pageviews Heatmap Given that a single visitor may visit a webpage several times, the Pageviews Heatmap shows the number of pageviews recorded at every area on the webpage.
Additionally, they provide some basic metrics like geography of users, browsers, screen sizes, and more.
I’ve been testing Clicktale on this blog for a couple of weeks in the private beta, and the data hasn’t been that insightful so far. Being that it’s a blog, almost all my heatmaps show that visitors spend more time and interest on the top of every page and I lose attention and interest as they scroll down the page. I think that’s rather obvious, so a standard blog might not be the best site for this. Although I’d suspect most websites share the common thread that users spend a lot of time near the top/center of the first screen they see. It’d be interesting though to do some tests like adding graphics farther down the page or things to catch people’s eye to test if it enhances their scrolling.
UPDATE:
I failed to mention in my post that Clicktale’s visitor recordings are really cool. You can see the actual scrolling and mouse movements throughout your site for entire user sessions. Centernetworks has a more detailed review of these features.
