Last weekend I blogged about mouse movement analytics. As opposed to traditional web analytics which just measure your web traffic, Clicktale actually records the movement of your visitor's mouse as it interacts with your web site content (Clicktale is available without charge for smaller web sites like my own).
For instance, where do people on your site ...
- move their mouse (even if they don't click)
- hover with their mouse (i.e. pause and reflect)
- actually click with their mouse
In my earlier post I promised some results, and shown below is an initial heat map for one page on my site, Engineering Learning.
Although the numbers of visits reflected in the heat map is not yet statistically significant, the data is already making me wonder if I need to take a different approach to my right hand column content. Other than my RSS feed, there is almost no mouse movement in the right column. Darker "fire colors" in the red spectrum indicate strong movement; colder "blue colors" indicate lesser movement density.
Click for an expanded view.
It appears evident that mouse movement across the page is also influenced by elements outside of the page.
i.e. the bottom tail is likely to be users moving their mouse down to their PC task bar.
the mouse activity across the RSS area could be users clicking their mouse on their Favorites/Bookmark toolbar and then moving the mouse down and across to clear the mouse off of the screen.
Some areas of screen will get mouse movement regardless of what content is displayed.
Posted by: anon | November 05, 2010 at 05:02 AM