Measuring your website visitor statistics is obviously important because it tells, among other things, whether or not your site is well-trafficked. What these statistics don't show however, is what the visitors are actually doing when viewing any of your sites pages. Measuring that behavior is critical to fine-tuning your site's ability to turn clicks into closes. Fortunately, there are several very easy and clever ways to do this.

Heat Maps – Determining What's "Hot" and What's Not

Crazy Egg is a relatively new and highly affordable service that allows you to track visitor behavior on any page of your site in the form of "Heat Maps." Think of a heat map as a visual overlay showing where visitors are physically clicking on a page. The brighter (i.e. "hotter") a spot is on your page, the more people are clicking on it. For example, click on the each of the thumbnail images below to see how this looks full size. The one to the right is what the sunnyvailrealestate.com website home page looks like. The one on the left shows the heat map overlay of visitor "clicking behavior" on that page.

This heat map not only shows the concentration of clicks, but quite literally, where the mouse was when they clicked. It will even show you evidence of people trying to click on things that are not clickable (but perhaps should be). These heat maps are typically generated over a test period for a fixed amount of time or a set number of visitors.

The reason these heat maps are so important is that they provide deep insight as to what visitors find valuable on your site, and just as importantly, what they don't. One student of mine used heat maps to discover that what she thought was an "irresistible offer" on her home page was anything but from her visitors' perspective -- almost no one was clicking on it. This gave her actionable insight to change her irresistible offer into something more … well, irresistible -- then tracking visitor behavior again to see if it worked any better.

You can try Crazy Egg for free, just go to crazyegg.com and sign up. During the registration process it will ask you which pages you want to track and then give you a special snippet of code to place on each page to be monitored (a simple one minute task for your Web person). Then all you do is indicate whether you want the test to terminate after a certain period of time or after certain number of people have visited your site. When the test is done you can view your heat map to see what's hot and what's not on those pages. Then by all means, make adjustments to the less popular parts of your site to make them more valuable in the eyes of your site visitors.

As powerful a tool as heat maps are, they are not the only way to monitor your visitor behavior.

Looking Over the Shoulder of Your Visitors

Robot Replay is an innovative service (currently free) that will record user sessions of your site pages in the form of videos. These videos will show visitor mouse movements, where they clicked, moving from page to page, form interaction -- including where on your forms they simply give up, etc. What you see in these videos is like looking over your visitors shoulders as they peruse your site. You can see demos of this by going to the Robot Replay website at www.robotreplay.com.

Like Crazy Egg above, it just takes adding a single line of code to the pages you want to monitor (and yes, you can use both Crazy Egg and Robot Replay at the same time). This service is currently in beta testing and can be a bit quirky at times. However, once they work the bugs out I see this as an awesome tool to really understand what your visitors do when they land on your site. (SPECIAL NOTE: Since this service will show everything your visitor does, including partially completing forms, it is probably a good idea to modify your Privacy Policy to indicate that your site is doing this kind of monitoring. Check with your legal advisor to be sure.)

Just tracking your site statistical analytics (unique visitors, page views, referrals, etc.) is no longer enough to ring every last ounce of business producing potential from your website. Once you monitor the very behavior of your visitors, only then will you have the insight necessary to stay on the path of incremental improvement that will maximize your site value.

NOTE: Mr. Internet&Reg;, RUSSER Communications, its staff and officers receive no compensation whatsoever from any third party vendors (unless he/they are directly involved with the creation and/or improvement of a vendor service or product), and make no recommendations as to the suitability of the products or services mentioned in this article. Always thoroughly investigate any product or service before trying or purchasing.

Published: February 7, 2008

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Michael J. Russer (a.k.a. Mr. Internet®) is an internationally acclaimed speaker, trainer, author, and strategic consultant to the real estate industry and small business. He is also the exclusive Internet columnist for REALTOR® Magazine, the architect of the revolutionary e-ProductivityTM system and leading voice for the use of Virtual Assistants in small business. You can subscribe to his free monthly leading-edge newsletter ePOWER NEWS by going to ePowerNews.com.