Guest blogger Jay Thompson is the designated broker and co-owner of Thompson’s Realty in Phoenix, AZ. You can find his award-winning blog at PhoenixRealEstateGuy.com. His latest blogging adventure is RealEstateBlogPro.com.

Do you ever wonder what and where people are clicking on your website or blog?

You should be wondering.

Most people have some sort of traffic analytics installed (Google Analytics, SiteMeter and Get Clicky are popular) – as you should. These programs will help you understand how people find your site, where they come from, and where they go to. But they do not always tell you what people do when they get to your site.

And what people do once they land on your site is critical. After all, you can have all the traffic in the world, but if they don’t do something that ultimately allows you to “capture” them as a potential prospect and “convert” them to a client, then what is the point in having a real estate web site?

Enter the heat map.

A heat map is a visual representation of where people click on a web page. Darker/more intense colors indicate a greater amount of clicks.

Here is a heat map for my blog’s home page for the first two weeks of September:

Note the areas that I outlined in red. They show a high density of visitor clicks. Given that clicks in all these areas will lead a visitor to a home search – which is exactly where I want them to go – this is a good thing.

Yes, my Google Analytics will tell me that a lot of people go to the home search. But what Google Analytics won’t tell me is where on the page people click to in order to get to the home search. A prime example is in the “Quick Home Search” area, which is outlined in red on the right sidebar in the image above. That quick search used to be located further down the sidebar. I noticed, via my heat map, that not many people were clicking on it. So I relocated that widget to the top of the sidebar and the clicks increased dramatically.

Heat maps are a fabulous tool for testing placement of design elements.

Another use for heat maps is finding where people are clicking but with no result. The last thing you want is for a site visitor to click something and have nothing happen. This frustrates visitors, and a frustrated website visitor will swiftly leave your site.

Here’s a perfect example. The theme and skin I use for my blog places an image for the most recent post alongside a snippet of text. By looking at my heat maps, I noticed a lot of people were clicking on that image:

The problem is, when people clicked that image nothing happened. They were expecting to be taken to the article, but they got nothing. So I added some code that would send the visitor to the full article when the image was clicked. A few minutes of work and we now have fewer frustrated site visitors.
Without a heat map, I never would have known how many people were clicking on that image.

So, how do I get a heat map for my site?

There are a few options for adding heat map capability to your site analysis arsenal.

ClickHeat: The images above are generated from ClickHeat, an Open Source (free) software program from LabsMedia. Installation can be a little tricky for the novice, as you have to upload files to your server in addition to placing some code on your pages. ClickHeat doesn’t have the depth of features available on the more commercial products listed below. On the plus side, there are no limits on the number of clicks and pages you can monitor with ClickHeat.

Crazy Egg: Crazy Egg is a very polished, very powerful heat map generator. Installation is straightforward: Crazy Egg will generate a small piece of code that you need to place on every page you want monitored (if you’re installing on a WordPress site, placing the generated code in your footer.php file will put the code on every page). They have various account levels based on visitors and number of pages monitored. Prices range from free to $99/month. The free level will track up to 5000 visitors/month on one page

ClickDensity: ClickDensity is very similar to Crazy Egg. Similar installation, features and pricing. Their pricing tiers range from free to $400/month, but their $5/month plan will store 10,000 clicks on unlimited pages – probably the best deal of the pay versions.

Which of these versions you should use depends on your needs. Personally, I want to track a large number of clicks on a large number of pages. So I opt for ClickHeat. It’s not as flexible as Crazy Egg or ClickDensity but I’ll live with that and save $100/month. If you don’t need to track as many visits, why not check them all out and pick the one you like? The free versions of Crazy Egg and Click Density may fit your needs perfectly.

Be careful, heat maps can be addicting…

Are you currently using a heat map on your website? Let us know how you like (or don’t like) that product. Any other tips?

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Keeping track of your site traffic is critical for any webmaster or web marketer. For a real estate professional taking their business online it’s going to be just as critical. At a minimum, tracking your site statistics can tell you who has visited your site, where they came from and what they looked at. It can also do much, much more.

Dustin posted at length on this subject recently, as his analysis of Rain City Guide’s traffic revealed some quite interesting trends.

To get started, there are a number of free options available to the webmaster, Sitemeter and Statcounter are two basic hit counters that I’ve tried and would recommend for very top level analysis. They offer very basic information; number of visitors, referrers and the like, and are a great way to quickly check out who’s coming to see you. Your web host will likely have some sort of traffic analysis package for you to use as well.

Performancing Metrics 

If you want to move up to more detailed analysis, have a look at Performancing Metrics, which is designed specifically for bloggers. (It’s from the guys who also make the wonderful Performancing blog editor plugin for Firefox). What I really like about Performancing Metrics is that it allows you to track multiple web sites from one account and even gives you an RSS feed of your statistics, which you can then subscribe to and get real-time updates of your traffic. The information is also presented in a very easily digestible format and gives you a good snapshot view of visitors to your site.

Google Analytics

If you really want to drill down into analyzing your site traffic, try Google Analytics, which just recently opened its doors to everyone. Prior to that, it was a closed beta that I was lucky to be able to take part in for the last several months.

Google Analytics is data smack for traffic junkies. There’s just a ton of information that you can dig around in. Honestly, far too much for me to recommend it for most webmasters – I even found it overwhelming at times. However, if you’re comfortable dealing with all the numbers, graphs, charts and diagrams and crave every detail from your last hit, then Google Analytics is the one for you.

The great thing about all of the options I’ve mentioned is that they are all free. Just be ware, all of them require you to cut and paste a small line of HTML code into your site template before they can begin tracking your visitors, so if you’re on a hosted platform like Wordpress.com or Blogger, you may have some problems.

Mint 

More recently, I have been playing around a paid product called Mint. Dubbed “a fresh look at your site,â€? Mint is the product of designer Shaun Inman, and costs $30 for a one site license.

Mint is a privately hosted traffic tracking package, meaning you need a free SQL database and some room on your server to host it. Once installed (just like the others, you need to place a snippet of HTML code in your site) Mint goes to work.

I really like Mint not only for its beautiful design and clear and concise way of presenting all the required information, but also the fact that it’s incredibly flexible and extendible. Because it’s built in PHP, Mint allows you to install plugins (dubbed Peppers) that allow you to customize the installation to exactly your requirement and greatly extend its base feature set. Check out PeppermintTea for all the current Peppers that are available.

Mint’s $30 price tag might be a turnoff to some. But it was definitely worth it in my books.

CrazyEgg

Finally, another fun site I’ve been playing around lately with is CrazyEgg, which offers you a unique way to track what visitors to your site do once they get there. CrazyEgg tracks the number of clicks that each link on your site receives and then presents that data is a visually interesting way.

CrazyEgg’s overlay view color codes the number of clicks on each link and with an expandable button shows you a percentage for each one.

Their heat map view, darkens your site and shows you (much like an infrared image) which parts of your site are “hotâ€? or not.

Any of these options will serve you well in tallying visits to your web site. I’d encourage you to play around with them all to see what mix works best for you.

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