CrazyEgg - great web tool

For those of you who run websites and would like a bit more information on how clicks work on your page - I can absolutely recommend CrazyEgg at http://www.crazyegg.com.

It provides heatmaps for your web page, meaning it'll show you your web page with an overlay of exactly where people are clicking. This can be arb, or phenomenal, depending on how you use it. For me it was really useful because I could see in the beginning that people weren't clicking on the screenshot to get to the screenshots page (which seemed obvious to me - mistake #1), they were clicking on the tiny "screenshots" right at the bottom. I added the orange Web 2.0 star saying "click here for screens"...and surprise surprise, people now click on the star! That increased clickthroughs and resulting downloads.

So to push the point again - some tools will show you which page you went to, from where. But they almost always will not show you which exact link the user used. CrazyEgg will. And even the exact spot on the link that was clicked.

So instead of thinking that a particular link is working, you can measure it, and react by changing your icons/layout, wording. That's pretty smart.