traffic-visualization: clickdensity

Posted on | August 6, 2006 | 2 Comments

analyzing website-traffic using the server’s access-log and common (free) tools like awstats or webalizer hasn’t really progressed a lot during the past years. the problem is, that log-data is too abstract for many business-executives and terms like ‘visit’, ‘unique visitors’ and ‘pages’ aren’t well-defined (f.e. the concept of ‘visit’ is based on an assumed timeframe/duration, which might differ among statistical tools). visualization service clickdensity offers an additional view on access-logs using heat-maps. by recording every single mouse-click (this is accomplished by integrating a javascript-snippet), clickdensity can generate visual representations of what links users are most likely to click on. moreover, clickdensity records the average time a user takes for his click.

clickdensity offers a 30day free-trial which records up to 5.000 clicks. the ‘Standard’-package for £50 records 250.00 clicks, high-traffic websites will be charged higher fees (see the details).

TechCrunch points to similar products, which in case of ClickTale (currently in closed beta) even record whole user-sessions to mini-movies, which is a nice feature if you plan deep anaylsis of how your visitors use your website. with the exception of Google Analytics (which doesn’t offer heat-maps), most services in the area of traffic-analysis are not free. clickdensity’s service seems quite pricy, but it’s a very clean way to get insight on top-level user-behaviour.

edit: can anyone remember that log-analyzer (probably 3+ years ago?) which visualized traffic-data in a SimCity-like animated environment? can’t recall that product’s name…

 

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