Ways to Track Visitors to Your Blog

By Lynette Chandler

Your traffic stats already tell you a lot about your blog. Like where your visitor comes from, which articles are popular, who's sending you the traffic. But every square inch of the screen is prime real estate. Do you know where is the best place to put your RSS feed or newsletter subscription? Your Ads?

How about where to put links to your products and services? What do people actually click on? What are people's eyes drawn to?

Many of us have totally unique blog designs, so something is available called a "heat map", which shows exactly where people look on a page, where their mouse moves, and which links are clicked. This can show you that although something may work on one blog, it may not necessarily work on your own. All this information can be obtained by installing a tracking system from CrazyEgg.com.

Using a system like this can be very useful if you decide to change the blog theme or change things around. You can use the map to test to see if the new design is an improvement as well as the site still being pleasant to look at. Another good thing about CrazyEgg is the feature of estimating which visitors are more likely to click on which links.

You can use this to track all kinds of advertising or promotions you participate in. There are other alternatives to CrazyEgg if you want to try them out.

A similar system exists called ClickHeat, which is an open-source project from Labsmedia.com. This needs to be installed on your own server, but works in much the same way as CrazyEgg, but without the same amount of detail.

Feng-GUI.com ( pronounced feng gooey) is a different alternative, which produces a simulation and estimate of where your visitors will click on your webpage. To make this easier, install the Firefox plug-in named "view finder website heat map". This is a useful tool when just starting out, but it's really better in the long run to use a paid version.

Clickdensity.com - much like CrazyEgg but looks like it has A-B testing in the premium product that CrazyEgg doesn't.

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