I mentioned briefly before that I had failed to get Omnitures ClickMap working but today I had a flash of inspiration and had another go. It is fairly well documented how it fails on the latest version of Firefox, but IE7, surely they would have fixed that? They had, I hadn’t restarted due to my alternative stance on environmentalism. Idiot!

So what is the fuss about? Web Analytics is all about the creative display of information and ClickMap (plus other providers in the field ie CrazyEgg) goes one step further to show your data in context of the page being reported. This is tremendously powerful because the insight drawn from this visualization of user behaviour can far better drive intelligent design decisions than any graph or scatter chart.

I could see straightaway that the most popular links were not what I expected. People do not particularly like large images and instead head for text links. The horizontal navigation was popular as indeed was the footer. Unbelievably it appeared that people were clever enough to know what they wanted and were not being swayed by fancy design. It is worth noting here that this is unlikely to change my choice of background images. They are here to stay. Sorry.

Then I delved in further. Perhaps I can identify trends over different times as the design changes. Hmmmm problems. No matter what range I selected I never got a click figure above 1000. Even when looking over a year period. I tweeter my frustrations and was surprised to hear back rather randomly from OmnitureCare. They were obviously trawling Twitted for negative tweets or messages that indicated that customers were having problems. This really is an example of fantastic customer service. I had already exhausted Google and forums and every other type of search worthy of my time. So getting answers directy from Omniture was exactly what I needed.

Anyway, they explained that since the ClickMap report relies on clicks, it records the x/y coordinate of that click. A design change will move those clicking goalposts and adjust the figures accordingly. In a way this is what you want because collecting figures across redesigns will disrupt your trend analysis. Each design change should be a response to actionable data from your ClickMap. Eg Problem: Video page with high exit rate Clickmap shows: people appear to be mostly clicking on the video link again even though they are already there. Solution: People may be expecting a video there and then, not just links to other videos. They are easily disappointed when not presented with what they have been promised. Stick a video on the page and hope that drives traffic to other related videos.

Anyway, a productive day on the whole including more site insight than many other reports combined and maybe more importantly a real business use for twitter?