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How Well Do You Really Know Your Visitors?
Most webmasters are using advanced analytics programs these days, and all serious affiliate marketers are. There are several good choices, with the most popular being Google Analytics. You need to get into the finer details of your web traffic to know what’s working and not working, and how to make the most of your existing traffic to convert more.
For those of us that want to know more about what a visitor does on our site, there are some very decent tools to do the trick. One idea that is not new but very useful is using heat maps - one of the best being crazyegg.com which also has other unique options such as their “confetti feature”.
Want even more detail than heat maps? I will let you in on something I have been using and it is one of the most useful tools I have seen since becoming a webmaster. It is called Clicktale. I know a few of you are already using it as well - and finding it just as useful as me.
Unfortunately that’s not an affiliate link because it doesn’t seem they have an affiliate program. They do have a free version which has a very low weekly cap on data. It’s a good enough software for me to review for free anyhow. Clicktale will record the exact movement of random users on your site and allow you to watch a video of any user it recorded.
What you do is put the code that they provide you into your site, similar to google analytics. You can set how often to record a user’s movements so it doesn’t just record the first 1000 then be done for the day, but spread them out. (Even the highest package has a 1000/day limit). I have found this to be an invaluable tool - it is much more than just a heat map where you can see on average who is clicking where - you get to watch various users actually navigating your site. There are a few different levels of membership ranging from free (100 free recordings/week) to Gold (1000 recordings/day) at $99/month.
Not only has Clicktale helped me realize where converting points on my websites are, it has provided some entertainment a couple of times too. One visitor who was on for about 2 minutes couldn’t seem to figure out where to click. There was several links on the page but he managed to click in between words, on all images that weren’t links, and randomly all over the page at least 50 times before finally clicking on a blogroll link to leave 
3 Responses to “How Well Do You Really Know Your Visitors?”
Leave a Reply
November 5th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Kyle, thanks for the great review. You should do a case study with us!
Everybody, we are planning to open and affiliate program soon. If you would like to be notified when it is up and running contact us with your email.
Regards,
Arik.
November 6th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Thanks for stopping by Arik, I’d love to do a case study. Looking forward to that affiliate program as well.
November 8th, 2007 at 4:28 am
Thanks for sharing Kyle, I subscribed to do a test run and love it so far