Knowing Where Your Users Click
So recently we’ve been looking at optimising the usability of one of our sites and I thought I’d share some of our findings with you. Essentially we installed a script that would track every click our users made on our Gifts UK site in the form of a heatmap, allowing us to see where the hot-spots are for a product page (click for a clearer image).
Essentially the aim of our product pages are to get the user to click through to the merchant site and buy the product, so it’s positive to see that users are indeed doing this. Like every industry the merchants we feature pay different commission rates, convert at different levels, run promotions, etc. So being able to divert a user through to a specific merchant whilst keeping choice available should products go out of stock and we not notice, means we are able to maximise our commissions.
The learning’s we’ve taken from our heatmap experiment:
1). You can’t really see because it is cut off at the top, but very few people click the big product image. Maybe having this link through to a high res image rather than the merchant and giving the user clearer direction will encourage this link to be clicked more. We will run an A/B split test to determine this.
2). We put a logo in the middle of the product description of the merchant we’re trying to encourage clicks too on the basis that the majority of users won’t get to the end of our copy. This has proven to be effective with a large majority of clicks going through this link (yellow gadgetshop logo at the top).
3). The biggest learning we took was from the logos we run across the bottom of the article to tell the user where to buy the product. We’ve always ordered these from left to right (as the eye reads) in order of which merchant we want the majority of users to go to. However we can clearly see that the majority of users are clicking the far right logo, with very few people going through the far left logo. We’ve tested this further today and switched these three logos around and regardless of which logo is where, the majority of users are clicking right to left. This is a big learning for us and will certainly allow us to divert our users more effectively in the future.
4). As we’re tracking every click a user makes you’ll see lots of random dots not on links, initially we put this down to user error, but maybe there’s enough clicks on the consumer review (grey box at the bottom) showing to think the user thought they could click that box to see more? I’m not sure on that one and will have to investigate further.
This is one days data on one page, we’re tracking the entire site so we’ve a lot of analysis to do and if anyone’s interested, I’ll share more of our learning’s going forward.
Now just because i’m a nice guy, you can find the click hotspot script we installed here:
http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html
It’s free to download and use and we had it installed and gathering data in less than 5 minutes. If you use the script let me know, and I’d love to hear some of your findings from your own sites.
