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Box UK has recently launched their own web analytics product called ClickDensity.
The software records various visitor behaviour statistics (position, click) when they are visiting a website. The data can then be displayed in the form of heat-maps to allow site owners to see the ‘density of clicks’ on a page section.
“The system offers visitor behaviour analysis, letting Website owners see where visitors are clicking, both measuring the relative popularity of link and detecting usability issues, such as showing where visitors are clicking that they shouldn’t be.”
The webside provides an excellent real time demo, so check it out.
Source: http://www.netimperative.com/2006/06/13/Box_UK/view
Ooooooo – new toys to play with!
I’ve already set up the 30 day trial and put the code on my blog!
Go click on stuff and I’ll share the heat maps (once I have sufficient data).
Instant Cognition
Yeah I thought it was pretty cool too. I wonder how many 30 day trial users will convert to buy.
This clickdensity rocks!
Manoj: How would this be different from what ClickTracks does, or for that matter most other tools do? They call it “Site Overlay”. I’ll admit that the visualization is nice on this one. Atleast when the other companies “push” eye tracking they are capturing more data than just the clicks, but this seems to be just the clicks. Would love to know your thoughts on why this is any different from what is already out there.
-Avinash.
Avinash,
From what I’ve read on their website they are really pushing the ability to track user behavior.
It says this software can track exactly where on an image a user has clicked and I think this might be useful when site owners are trying to determine the styles of ads to show (in terms of best CTR).
Click Density does differ from some other software (such as clicktracks) in that their user interface can show a heat map type perspective. Displaying click popularity this way could allow for a better initial assessment of a page.
Did you get a chance to try the demo?
Manoj,
Thanks for your additional thoughts.
I did try the demo. The heat map and click map seem to be the same thing (differen visualization, colors in the first case vs red). I think the incremental is that this solution will capture random clicks on the page (for example in the demo you’ll notice a lot of clicks on the green text box on the bottom right).
It could have applications for example if people keep thinking some links are clickable and click on them and in reality those are not clickable. That is good to know.
It would be great to know the kind of privacy implications of this (for example if we are “watching” where the mouse hovers that needs extra “monitoring” beyond the standard javascript tag).
I have seen one other solution do what these guys are doing, almost exactly, I should dig that out and email it to you.
Great find, thanks for posting on your blog, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Thanks again.
-Avinash.
Hi,
I just thought I’d respond to some of the questions about clickdensity (I’m one of the team behind it).
The ‘heat map’ visualisation is a really, really useful tool – quite different from a ‘site overlay’.
Many of our users have spotted – almost immediately – huge marketing and usability issues/opportunities within seconds of seeing a heat map; so in that way, they are a very different medium to the ‘overlay’, which is a more structured, analytical approach to tracking user behaviour. Heat maps can be analysed by pretty much anyone in your organisation – all the way up to director level; traditional web analytics (even site overlays) are more statistics/number based.
The more exact ‘click map’ (which plots exact clicks, rather than just a heat map) can be used to more finely analyse factors such as ‘overspill’ (we often see objects on the page where there are ‘missed’ clicks around their edges, due to their size, or positioning).
Avinash, you’re absolutely right about seeing what users are clicking on that AREN’T links. You’d be suprised how often this happens. Some major customers of ours have spotted areas of their page where customers are obviously getting frustrated by trying to click on something that wasn’t a link. In one of these cases, it was an ad-button style graphic with a phone number on, that didn’t link anywhere. In another case, the user had placed bold highlighted keywords in their main text, that happened to use the same style/formatting as links in the main menu – and so people were clicking on them! As you can imagine, both of these were quite easy to rectify once the problem was spotted…
The software is very much geared at analysing usability, and information architecture too; we don’t want to get too far into the over crowded ‘web analytics’ market (we provide core web stats as supplementary information).
Because of this, and to separate us from some of our competitors, we’re building in lots more functionality to help with both analysing and fixing usability issues; for example, we’re currently building in some “A/B testing” functionality, to help users implement and test fixes to any problems that clickdensity highlights.
I think that the similar software you’ve seen is Crazyegg (www.crazyegg.com) or maybe Adgreed (www.adgreed.com); we’re not shy about having competition – we’re confident in our product!
As for privacy issues, this is something we have considered and are constantly reviewing. We’re not recording any data (above X/Y position) beyond what is recorded in standard web logs (we don’t record mouse movement or hover times, for example).
We have at least 15 or 20 other bits of functionality on our roadmap for the next 6 months, so it’s worth keeping an eye on the site (and our competition, of course), because I get the feeling that things are going to get very interesting! There’s lots of new ways that this data can be visualised; it’s going to be exciting to see how it develops.
Thanks,
Dan
Dan, Thanks for the information.
I will definitely have more feedback after using it some more.
I am interested in seeing your A/B testing framework.