The rather random clicking habits of the average user or sabotage of my new click tracking gadget?

ClickHeat is an interesting open source script that can be used to track users clicks on your website. I thought I would stick it on since it gives a slightly more detailed view than Google Analytics and would be interesting to compare to more costly products such as Omniture and its ClickMap feature.

After the cake traffic increase fiasco of last week, I finally had enough data to actually see if it was of any use, but was somewhat confused by the results. Either everything on my site looks worthy of a click, (possible considering its complex, and some would say annoying design) or the average internet user is a moronic drooling zombie clicking their mouse in a frenzy and hoping they manage to avoid real links long enough to read any content displayed to them. There is some obvious patterns of heightened clicking around my navigation items. This underlines my findings at commercial clients that shows that users like horizontal navigation and are often more likely to click on one of these links than any exciting looking promo.

After thinking about this I have decided that this must be because its really rather tricky to provide compelling content to all visitors of a site in only a few promos/blog posts. This means that in the hope of finding something of interest, people click on links where they may find something better. Links like “Photos” and “Craft” and not specific enough to put users off and are general enough to give the hope of something interesting on the next page. At least thats my hypothesis. I many ways this form of click tracking is just not very helpful on a design with a blog form-factor. There are just not enough areas to click on. Each post takes up a fairly considerable space. Many users may just scroll down the page looking at the pictures and reading the text that is visible rather than clicking on each post. Certainly with the hopeless performance of this site, people are even less likely to explore further in their zombie like state, or otherwise. Really the usefulness of this kind of analysis comes when you have a more portal like homepage that can show which areas of the page get more attention than others. This to can be misleading though, since changing content is not taken into account by ClickHeat and so what is popular one day and garners plenty of clicks, may be very unpopular the next. The result is probably something not dissimilar than the results shown above.

I suppose I will keep ClickHeat enabled for now. It certainly would be far more interesting if I ever get a substantial number of readers. Even just from an ethical note, I feel happier knowing I know as much as possible about the readers of this blog since if the BBC or any other popular broadcaster/website started implementing these slightly more visual tracking solutions they would probably get compaints.