Site Stats: Turn Up the Heat

Published on Tuesday, February 13, 2007

When our site was redesigned we wanted the new look to inherit two traits from the Surpass Philosophy: simplicity and straightforwardness. We like to get in and out of a site fast and know exactly what’s being offered and how it can be of help to us. Now that our new site has been up for some time now, we needed a little insight on what we can’t see. We have tracked with Mint since March 2006 and have a big brick (our affectionate name for the huge Mint database) of visitor information, but something was missing. We needed a bigger and better analysis of visitor trends.

Enter CrazyEgg. They offer a monthly service that allows you to see exactly where site visitors are clicking. The results are visual, even beautifully visual when you take a look at their heat map. A heat map you say?

It can cost a pretty penny to track a lot of clicks, but you may get all of the insight you need from one month. All heat map services offer free trials and added services. We’ve included some links below if you decide to seek the heat.

Links:
CrazyEgg.com - Free Starter Plan
ClickDensity.com - Free Starter Plan, seems to have more goodies than CrazyEgg
LabsMedia.com/ClickHeat - Open Source, but not as fancy looking as CrazyEgg and ClickDensity

So what have we found so far? Shared hosting is our most popular service by far, even in our forum Shared Discussion is the hot spot. We now have a plan of action to spice up our reseller hosting and other lines. We also noticed that our site map is tumbleweed territory. We’ve removed the site map link to make room for the blog link. Site maps aren’t what they used to be!

Stay toasty!

Comments

BrandonPosted on Tuesday, February 13, 2007

It is cool to see Crazy Egg in action with Surpass Hosting.. NICE

TwirpPosted on Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Quote "Open Source, but not as fancy looking as CrazyEgg and ClickDensity" It's free though... And some people (who don't have money) take time to beautify things... But that's still pretty cool. Does it track random clicks? Like if I click somewhere randomly on the page that's not even a link? If it does you should get everyone in the forum to click in like a certain pattern to make a giant happy face or something...

DewKnightPosted on Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Agreed that sitemaps are a thing of the past, but still very useful. I suggest at least placing it on the bottom of the page (That is always where I look for the site map anyways)

PreshitPosted on Thursday, June 14, 2007

Thanks Kayla, for the links. ClickDensity sounds good. I'll give it a try soon for my blog.