How can I find out what people are doing on my website?

When you think about it, your website is a black hole isn’t it! Someone visits your site but you’re not sure what they actually do when they arrive, or why they leave. Google Analytics can tell you quite a bit, but not the whole story.

But I’ll show you a tool that will help you gain some valuable insights into how your website is used by visitors. Real-world user testing if you like.

I strongly recommend you try Crazy Egg. A crazy name for an amazingly cheap and powerful tool.

Crazy Egg allows you to create heat maps of click activity, but not just on links (which you can see anyway with Google Analytics’ “site overlay” feature), but on non-links.

A practical example where we’ve used this before was on an e-commerce website. We saw that people were clicking on product images on the home page. That’s fine, but the images weren’t linked to the product pages (just the description text link underneath). It was creating a small friction point for visitors as soon as they entered the site.

The other thing we noticed was that people were clicking on a phone number located in the header! God knows why people do that, but we linked the image to the contact us page and saw a modest lift in contact inquiries.

Recommendation No 1. Link images to appropriate pages!

The other feature I like is the “confetti feature”, which allows you to view the precise location of each and every click on your site as well as where the visitor came from, and, if they came from a search engine, what key phrase they used and how long it took for them to actually make the click.

You can also use it as a simple A/B split testing tool.

Let’s say you’re concerned about bounce rates, how many people visit your home page and leave without visiting any other page, for example.

You can run an initial test to gauge activity with the original home page for say 1000 page views. Using the information you’ve gathered from click activity, you make necessary adjustments to your home page and run the test again for another 1000 page views.

Did this help lower bounce rates? If so, make another change and test again.

Recommendation No 2. Use Crazy Egg to test different variations on a page to lower bounce rates.

For about $US9 a month for 10,000 page views, it’s worth the investment and an absolute doddle to set up.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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