Heat/Click maps

Most readers will be familiar with these but if your not basically a click heat map measures the number of clicks occurring on specific parts of a page (normally links) and then creates a pretty density match the more clicks the brighter the colour (normally they look like heat maps hence the name) they are used to see areas of interest for users and where users are leaving. These maps are really quite useful if you know how to use them and you can easily get started using open source software like Clickheat and there are also paid for services out there.

Temporal Click Density maps

So I’m sure the title (time based click maps) has given away what our current project is all about, you see clickmaps give a very two dimensional view of click density by introducing time, we get a much better picture of what areas are being clicked on and some motivation behind them. Unfortunately introducing time into web analytics is notoriously difficult perhaps more so then it would appear on first glance.

Time periods
The first problem is accurately recording time, either you rely on the server or the clients browser to record the time, both come with problems and neither can be considered accurate the solution in this case is simply to probe in time periods in our case we have chosen a near logarithmic scale for determining time periods. It would be unhelpful if 99% of all our clicks were in our first time period because we chose to long a period and likewise we wish to keep processing and data storage overheads down so polling data every second is unrealistic.

In focus or idle?
The next hurdle is determining if they are even looking at the page all modern browsers are capable of tabs and multiple windows, and so users could leave a page open and be surfing for hours on another window never to return to your site. Likewise a user referencing your site can be coming backwards and forwards between tabs or windows. Most browsers now support some javascript focus option which will allow you limited knowledge when combined with blur. However this does require that we first access the browsers capabilities . In reality we actually use compiled action script assuming the user has flash and fall back to javascript only really for iphone browser and similar.

Some Temporal Click Density Map goodies

ok so now for some totally unhelpful yet oddly cool tidbits we have discoverd while running temporal clickmaps on a couple of our sites. Remember now this is just initial findings on a couple of sites.

Greater the density the earlier the click – Afraid so from our initial finding the click area with the greatest number of clicks also had the clicks in a short period of time relative to their arrival. The positive side is a good call to action is likely to be clicked on quickly.

Adverts are clicked late – This was a little surprising I had always assumed advert clicks occurred quite early on but adverts tended to be clicked later, is this showing a subconscious desire to complete the primary call to action? Well possibly and (warning blatant plug ahead) its certainly the theory we have put forward for why newmedias.co.uk Your CAPTCHA advert wordpress plugin works (end of plug)

Further down the page the later – yep your hocked but the lower down the page the longer it takes to get clicked, there is an exception to this and that is pre known call to actions a good example being long sales pages where we saw a split between quick clicks vs long clicks. So some people realising the style of page shot to the bottom while others waited.
Interesting and this is when this sort of mapping comes into its own, those who waded through the long sales page and clicked to purchase were statistically less likely to complete the transaction

Stumblers really do hate you – a couple of years ago I posted about the fact that the most clicked area on a page during a stumble was the top left hand side and theorised that this increase was due to stumblers missing the stumble button. With the new system we can see the different density levels for the top left for stumblers vs non and with a noticable difference between the two the theory still stands to make things worse… nearly all those clicks are in the first time period meaning you really don’t have much chance to impress.

So what do you need to get temporal data going on your site, well clickheat map system is a good start I recommend labsmedia clickheat php class as a starting point. Then you need to measure time and focus we use an actionscript system but I would be interested in seeing or hearing other ideas. Indeed if people want to play with our code I maywell clean it up and throw it up on newmedias.co.uk

Warning I used a custom font so slideshare has done it’s best to convert but hasn’t quite managed it

Other Notes

Do not Spam, keeping track of categories and tags is pretty important, people actually spend their lives recategorising misplaced stumbles.

Related posts are not always the best idea for the bottom of the page, this is a general tip that real estate at the bottom of the post between the post and comments is a great location to focus their attention on your best posts. To often related posts do not provide any meaningful results.

What would Seth do plugin is interesting if used with referral data (or indeed something like Waynes’ socialize me) to provide a means to give stumblers a call to action. However avoid linking directly to the review page, if they want to leave a review or thumb up they can use the toolbar and this will be more useful in the long run.

Stats are ambiguous at best, with StumbleUpon precaching pages, JavaScript stats being unreliable at times any way your stats will be haywire. Also like most social media your bounce rate will not make much sense. If you have an analytics package that will segment stats from a source you will see just how much confusion Stumble causes.

Thumb up content you like, seems obvious but if you like content thumb it up, if you don’t like it think carefully about thumbing it down. Of course if it’s rubbish then thumb down.

Never use the sendto… or have buttons linking directly to reviews, get them to vote via tool bar.

Try not to stumble your own site or someone else’s site continuously you are not doing yourself any favours, likewise if the same person constantly stumbles your site first every time it maybe worth asking them not to. Very politely.

How do I know if my content is good for StumbleUpon you can always test it via a sponsored stumble , these are adverts that are shown to non Pro Member stumblers they can be thumbed up or down as normal but the effect of these thumbing up and down are not felt till after the ads number of stumbles has come to the end. The nice thing about sponsored stumbles is you get pretty good figures as to how many stumblers liked dislike your content. While normally in stats you want a lot of data even 100 visit sample is enough to get an idea of how well the content will do. For the pro blogger who is really aiming at linkbait you can try changing on page conditions using the Google web optimizer to create multivate test though for accurate results you will need more then 100 visits. Also it would take some clever coding to associate the thumb up as your goal but it is possible.

Negative Stumbles, afraid it does happen we discussed some of the dubious tactics to upset a competitors stumble site.

If you are interested I have some articles on Does Social Begging Work?, Second chance for Stumblers, Stumble graveyard and StumbleUpon Maths some of these posts are old but still valuable I think. Don’t forget my profile is tnash.stumbleupon.com but really I want people to join StumbleUpon and have fun, its not a tool its just an addiction…

Blatant plug, but on the 19th of September I will be in Leeds at the second northern Bloggers Meetup. Where I will be doing a short presentation and no doubt answering questions on one of my favourite subjects of StumbleUpon. Given how much this topic has been talked about in the past I will use my usual numbers and stats routine to dispel some of the myths such as “you can’t sell on Stumbleupon” and show you just how long you have to impress the average stumbler.

Photo by Jon Eland – Group shot of the Board Room at Old Broadcasting House at the last Meetup

I won’t be speaking at any conferences this year the only one I even pondered talking at was a4uexpo which Al from Self Made Minds will be speaking at and Patrick from Blog Storm is planning to attend but since the rude souls didn’t even have the courtesy of emailing me a reply it’s their loss I’m not that offended

Anyway the good news is the North of England Bloggers Meetup is free (you can subscribe to the mailing list for latest details) to attend and has some great people associated with it including Jaime Harrop and Chris Garrett (of problogger book fame) so if your in Leeds at around 6.30pm with nothing to do then the Old Broadcasting House is the place to visit! Tea and coffee were provided last time with a request that you made a small donation of 50p or a £1 and it ended in a local pub. I can’t imagine it will not happen like that this time either

I personally prefer small gatherings every person I met at the last meetup had something interesting to say and being small and informal means you will learn so much more then large expensive conferences where lets face it the speakers are pushed for time and have to appeal to the masses so even if they did have something interesting to say it normally gets lost. While the Northern Bloggers meetup is under the umbrella of Wordcamp its open to all and if your not in the north of England look to see if you have one locally they might not have an amazing StumbleUpon session going but I’m sure it will be almost as good.

WordPress 2.6 guess what your going to upgrade!

Yes its that time when Automatic demonstrate they truly are a useless company and once more have punched another nail into WordPress already rather stuffed coffin when it comes to enterprise deployment. Don’t know what the fuss is about well wordpress.org sums up their entire philosophy in 2 lines.

2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade. source:http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/

So expect a major security bug some time this afternoon to hit 2.5 to help encourage take up after all the article goes on to say…

1,984,047 downloads of the 2.5 series, the fastest growing release we’ve ever had!

Which was not in anyway influenced by the 3 major security bug scare stories going on at all.

Good WordPress News!

In case you have been living under a rock… Your Members the WordPress Membership Plugin was launched! Cheer for joy and go buy it, preferably in that order.

Also Sean who has been so busy working on YM that he forgot to speak to his other half for a week has released a rather handy stat plugin which keeps a list of recent visitors its incredibly lightweight and while won’t replace Google Analytics any time soon is great for seeing who is on the site right now. Check it and his blog out at sean-barton.co.uk

Money.co.uk

Yes its not enough they besmirch the name of Cornwall SEO by pretending they didn’t know that cunning baiter was telling stories now they have got into the widget game… But look who’s promoting ah mr Chow how nice of him…

Just a thought though money.co.uk haven’t we been here before, with the whole viral widget thing?
Hat tip to Dark SEO Programming.

Total aside but Melanie from Pro-Webs is offering a free white paper on landing pages that convert you never know it might be of use.

Stompernet goes lazy

Oh and in exciting news Andy Jenkins is going to tell the Stomper Newsletter if Traffic Secrets 2 is any good… Yawn I will save you the suspense he will say its absolutely amazing and you must buy it because he was blown away yada yada ultimately a rather pathetic attempt at encouraging sales which is a shame because the Stompernet team are normally a lot less obvious and tend to put time or at least perceived time into their marketing and promotional efforts.

Last couple of bits for more serious reading, Yahoo Patent on Link Anchor text relevancy (SEO by Sea) while Mr Harry is doing Research into Diversity of Link Profiles .

Hopefully I will return with something more serious in a while, but I leave you with this…

If my first link is described as a fruit while the second a computer but both arrive at the same location am I a fruit, a computer, or just unclassified juice?

Reputation Management

My friend (soon to be ex) Glen has recently published a guide to Reputation Management sadly he didn’t send a preview to me so I presume the fear of some one who specialises in the subject was to much for him instead he sent it to… oh well you live and learn. Still I demand you go buy the book, and I demand Glen goes and studies product launches, I do not want you to miss out on his hard work because of his poor planning and when I get a copy I will of course happily review it!

Product Launches

Speaking of product launches here is how to do it…
Never believe a man who says we are not launching anything, honest, the Stompernet guys are at it again with a great hour long (nearly) free video and a couple of other follow ups. Setting the scene for reopening the doors at Stompernet. I am not a PPC guy and while the breath taking secret regarding split testing was a little disappointing sorry guys this maybe due to my background. This does not stop the video from being a must, particularly if you do have PPC clients or campaigns running. Also worth checking out some of the commentary on Dans’ Split Testing: You’re doing it wrong (the guy talking on the vid) and Andys’ Banned from Google which was a way cooler title then I thought up.

Comparing Sizes

Yes mine really is bigger then yours, well maybe not but Paul from North South Media takes a look at Googles Benchmarking component and starts to wonder where is his traffic? However a quick glance at his stats would actually make people jealous get past the low numbers and look at his above average bounce rate (sorry below average) and time on page and you begin to see that sometimes its not all about the number of visitors. You can have 20k visits via social media but if they all immediately click away other then driving your hosting bills up what was the point?

Talking Stats

I have been testing Woopra the data privacy nightmare! which sadly I turned off after I was unable to confirm if they were part of the safe harbour agreement.

For those in the UK (running a company, business or website) this is rather critical, but to recap (I am not a lawyer) Servers which are in a different country which have personal identifiable information should be registered with the Information Commissioner Office (this is a length process) to tell them the data is being shipped abroad. However you can ship to data to countries that have Data Protection Regulation on par with the EUs, this means in practice UK business can use third party servers through out Europe and countries like Australia. However the United States of America does not have anything like the required level and therefore you should not be shipping your personal data there. However companies in the US can join a program called Safe Harbour this is an agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom if a company your sending data to is not party to the Safe Harbour agreement then you could be risking fines and potentially a jail sentence.

The problem is Woopra best features, real time tracking, tagging of individual users and the ability to chat with them means that you can identify and track individuals in real time, since they are holding the data you are in effect shipping personal identifiable data to Woopra.

This is a shame because Woopra is damn good stats program, its pretty and would be the sort of thing any self respecting Techie would have on their plasma screen.

Finally and you know you want to!

Do you know some people are still not organised enough to have become members of this fine blogs various communities! I know how shocked was I when I realised that no one loved me but you will rectify this problem I know you guys will so here goes….
Communities

• Tim Nash SEO Blog – Mybloglog community
• Tim Nash SEO Blog – BlogCatalog community
• Tim Nash SEO Blog – Facebook Blog thing

Follow Me

• Tim Nash – StumbleUpon
• Tim Nash – del.icio.us
• Tim Nash – Friendfeed

You could even follow me on Twitter though don’t expect much in the way of activity!

So without further ado the collective:

• Andy Beard – andybeard.eu
• Brian Wallace – Now Sourcing
• Mark Laymon – AlistSEO
• Marty Weintraub – AimClear
• Rose Sylvia – PPCthink
• Shana Albert – Social Desires
• Tadeusz Szewczyk – SEO2.0

and me, but skip that for a moment and think what an awesome line up can you afford to miss out, nope I didn’t think so best if you race over and subscribe to the feed now.

What’s more while my first post is tomorrow they have already got some amazing content up, with Brian and Shana kicking us off!

• 7 Ways to own social media before it owns you!
• Webmaster, stop being so anti-social!

So if you haven’t already head over there give us a Sphinn or a Stumble and kick back to some really good social media posts, and then some from me

What we will be covering?

• Brief introduction and overview
• Specific content
• Pre arranged questions
• A final Q&A on previously covered areas

The seminar is split into two with the first part a short formal presentation on social media optimisation and looking at the big two sites Stumbleupon and Digg as well as discussing how niche sites differ. However the bulk of the time will be given over to questions and answers, each participant will be asked to pre submit questions prior to the seminar with at least 1 question from each participant being answered before having a less formal Q&A covering any other burning questions.

The Cost covers

• The seminar
• Copy of notes, and slides
• “Formal” answers to questions

Who might appreciate this course?

I hope anyone interested in Social Media will find it an interesting couple of hours, and anyone who can use a web browser is welcome to attend. While experienced social media optimisers may find nothing new in the talk it will be designed to at the very least entertain.

So if you don’t mind spending a few dollars, have a broadband connection and no life threatening appointments to keep on the 14th I recommend you come I will not be upset if you don’t of course

For those wishing more information or who wish to book their spot please get in touch