Are YOU Covering Your Tracks??

In an article by Nick Bilton of the New York Times called  "Viewing the Mouse Tracks You Leave Behind,"  Anatoly Zenkov (@anatolyzenkov), a Russian graphic designer and programmer is recognized as the developer of a free downloadable application called “mouse pointer track.” The application allows you to make a piece of art out of your mouse movements over any period of time. During the time it took Bilton to write his article (while surfing the web) he was able to create this >>

The reason I was so interested in Bilton’s article in the first place is because I have been exploring tools that will allow me to track users' mouse movements online.

As you can see from the images on Mr. Zenkov’s Flickr page, he has been tracking different mouse movements in different application settings.

Though Zenkov’s tool doesn't make the mouse tracks of an online user available for research purposes, there are several tools that do >> I use crazyegg. It shows a heat map overlay of user movement on a website. Crazyegg as well as the other heatmap tools mentioned show you where on your site users are clicking and give you the ability to find out where your click volume is coming from. 

Heatmaps [allow you to] visualize the stream of visitors on your website - showing hot and cold click zones. They provide an overall view of the activity and help you to see every mouse movement and every click. It will improve web usability, conversions and revenue. -KNOWTEBOOK

My real life example >> The reason I started using crazyegg is very simple. I was having an issue with the tracking code on a website with which I was working. The page that was linked to the goal conversion I set up in Google Analytics (GA) was an external page, which made the implementation of the tracking code a little bit more difficult. Since the code was taking so long to implement and I really needed the info. on click volume to present to the client, I used crazyegg. The external link that I wanted to track was actually an application download and since GA wouldn't have been able to show me anything but the number of clicks on the download link page (since I hadn't yet implemented the tracking), I figured crazyegg would do the same. The heatmap of the site showed me exactly the information that I needed in order to present the client with feedback. Because warmer colors show the most clicks, I knew that the big red dot over the download button was where our click volume was coming from on that page!