Challenge the public wisdom in Web Analytics (2)--Hot map

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Everyone is immersed in time and is swept away by the passing years. Man's life is just a struggle against time. We would like to seize a love, a friendship, but these feelings can only be attached to people to survive, and each of us, as time goes by, also constantly disintegration and sinking-or die, or sneak out of our lives, or we have changed. --Proust

"Foreword" in the last period we discussed in detail the bounce rate some of the public wisdom, for everyone to explain the "too much" of the truth, bounce rate too low is not good, bounce rate too high may be just technical reasons. In this issue, we look at another tool that our friends are particularly fond of--the hot map. Look at the heat map of the public wisdom of what "small misunderstanding."

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"A picture wins thousand words", in the website analysis also completely. The reason we like the heat map is that it tells us very clearly what the user is interested in and very intuitive about what part of a page. I once had a client tell me: I do not need anything, you give me the heat map is good. I think he must be because Getouis read accessible, and full of information, so he favored it.

As a result, many of the tools also intentionally or unintentionally stressed the importance of hot map, we are keen to create a better than "others" hot map function, so as to obtain more user goodwill.

This heat map is not a heat map

Getoux may not be as simple as everyone thought. The earliest thermal graph thought comes from the research user browsing image behavior of those experts, in fact, the hot map is not only for the Web page analysis used, Getoux from the beginning, is a serious scientific method used to study human visual cognition.

So the heat map is not what we see on the Web Analytics tool (click the density map), but the user's visual attention map. The red and blue gradient of the famous Google Hot map is the one that depicts the attention of the user.

It is said that Google uses this map to determine the price of the advertising position, the price on the left is higher than the right, obviously because the left of the user's attention far higher than the right.

So, if we just say "hot map", we should think of the attention of the person's glasses, not the hot figure of the click. In English, the visual thermal map commonly used eye tracking heat maps, click on the hot map with click Heat said, is not the same.

For UE designers, website UI and other responsible for page vision and interaction of friends, the eye attention of the hot map is very useful. Once you know what you're doing and how people's eyes look, you can see if your stuff is really "catching the eye" or just making people "blind".

Here's a picture of the user's attention before and after Facebook's revision. A word or two does not seem to describe the success or failure of the revision, but in one respect, Facebook has been successful in making the user's attention "symmetrical" and getting rid of "Google Page browsing mode".

How is the attention-heat map of the human eye obtained? There are two ways.

The first approach is to use the "eye movement", which is said to be a costly method. People sit in front of a screen, with their eyes moving to record the trajectory of their eye movements. This method is very accurate, but the sampling is relatively limited, the operation is more difficult.

The second method does not require the use of eye-moving apparatus, which looks magical. It only needs a laptop with a webcam. When doing the test, the camera starts, pats the user's eyeball movement, then unifies the measured content to make the user's eye movement heat diagram. This approach has a very big advantage, not only because of its low cost, but because it does not require specialized equipment, can obtain large samples, and can even be protected from geographical constraints. Regarding this method, has the service provider in the foreign country, the name is called Eyetrackshop, everybody may look it the video introduction.

Talk about a lot of attention to the heat map, it is said to hit the hot map. On the click of the hot map, in fact, in the special web site analysis tools have appeared, not Google Analytics or omniture patents. Depending on the effect of each click, click on the map can also be divided into a mouse click of the heat map, describe the number of changes in each link to the heat map and describe the final sales of each link generated by the hot map. The most commonly used is the hot image of the mouse click.

Let's take a look at the popular wisdom in the hot map, and what are the pitfalls.

Click on the heat map can not do

It is appropriate that we measure the interest of the user by clicking on the Heat map, which indicates that the user is interested in more. But the reverse is not necessarily true, that is, less clicks are not necessarily the user's interest is less, or that people's attention is attracted to the extent and the number of mouse clicks is not always consistent. The reason is very simple, the place that people notice is not necessarily the area that can be clicked, or even though the appeal to the user is overwhelming, it is not convincing enough to allow the user to click on the link (please note that attractive things are not necessarily persuasive); Conversely, in other places, Maybe the user didn't pay more attention at first, but some of the users saw it and recognized the value of the area, so there may be a lot of clicks, but it's not the focus of attention. Therefore, the click of the hot map can not be fully used to describe the page to attract people's attention, and can not fully meet the design of the page when we have an important requirement, that is, the most important part of the page to capture people's attention, so as to ensure that the user's attention and interest consistency.

The following example illustrates this situation. The image on the left is the hot map of the page, the right image is the attention of the page, the two have a very obvious difference.

For the UE (user experience) or UI (user Interface), it is of great value to compare the differences between the two (attention-and-click). If a region attracts a lot of attention, why don't we put the most important stuff here? Conversely, if a region gets a lot of clicks, and the area is very important, then we need to place it where people are most focused. However, if we do not have the attention-heat map, then we can only speculate that people's eyes will stay the way we want.

Click on the hot chart another function that is not achievable is the trajectory of people's attention movement. Some friends who are responsible for web analytics tools tell me that we can take the trajectory of the mouse movement as a trajectory for the user's attention. I don't particularly agree. In my own custom, when browsing the web, my eyes move first, and I scan until I find something that interests me, and my mouse moves accordingly. This is just like when we are in the process of changing lines or steering, we do not rotate the steering wheel unless we first look at the rearview mirror and make sure there are no other vehicles or disturbances next to it.

The attention-heat map can be used to track people's attention, as shown in the following illustration:

In this figure, attention Getoux tells us that the first thing that attracts people's eyes is the back of the head, and then the logo of the site. This is different from what we normally think of as a scan from left to right.

The attention trajectory gives us a new clue to the page--the layout of the page and the image used will significantly affect the user's attention. If combined with AB test, it can give us a lot of interesting stories. A lot of help to UI colleagues.

If we do not have the attention trajectory, then the mouse movement can be approximately replaced. But the trouble is that the tools I've seen can only give me a single mouse move for each user, but I can't give my overall mobile profile. In our later series, we will emphasize the significance of the profile data, and the individual user data is much less meaningful.

So, if you have the conditions, it's great to be able to combine the attention-and-click-Heat graphs. Your perspective on the world will change immediately. After all, awareness (aware) will have action (click), the two are separate two things, should be measured separately.

The monitoring technology of the hot-click

As we learned earlier that clicking on a hot map does not fully reflect interest (attention), let's take a look at the possible monitoring technology problems in the general tool (Google Analytics or Omniture sitecatalyst).

The first problem is the inability to handle multiple links with the same URL in one page.

If you are careful enough, you will find that once in Google Analytics, there are some hot map of the Click percent of the callout is a real line, and some are dotted lattice. The dotted lattice means that there is one or more links with exactly the same URL, and this link is just one of them, and the percentage of the callout is not the click of the link, but the total number of clicks for all links with this URL. Now Google Analytics a better way to directly label how many of the same URLs there are (as shown on the right). Because multiple links share the same URL, explain why some friends seriously put Google Analytics page click on the hot map of all the percentages add up will not get 100%, but is far higher than 100% reasons.

Similar problems are the same in the sitecatalyst of Omniture technical support.

In fact, the words "clicks" Three words in the above paragraph are inaccurate. The reason is, Google analytics or sitecatalyst, they record not the number of this link is actually clicked, but recorded the link was clicked after the corresponding page to open the PV. For example, a link was clicked 100 times and the link's page was opened 85 times (we are sure that some clicks are not actually open or are not recorded by the Web Analytics tool to open the page is entirely possible and normal), then the tool actually records 85, not 100.

As a result of this problem, we have a second problem--if we don't do extra configuration (Virtual page monitor or outside chain monitor), we can't know some links that can't open new pages, such as JavaScript window, or links to other people's websites (outbound Link) The number of clicks.

Therefore, the General tool of the click of the hot map does not tell you what the actual number of clicks. However, there are other hot mapping tools they record the mouse action, rather than record the link is clicked to open a new page, so they will be more accurate record of the actual page clicks, even the mouse trajectory. But this seems to have sacrificed some other functions, such as in the ordinary Google Analytics thermal map, you can record the number of transformations generated after each link click, and make a "transformation" of the heat map, sales amount of the heat map is not a problem, But mouse action and track monitoring tools are difficult to have such ability, after all, they do not know the transformation of the site.

The third problem is that links to pages such as "Carousel focus graphs" are more disturbing. In these places, Google Analytics's thermal mapping tool gives several parallel, looming data, and it's not easy to tell exactly what the click of the carousel is. Also, when you put the mouse over the label, the label runs away with a "naughty" look. In a word, it's not easy to use, it's confusing.

As a matter of fact, I rarely use it directly from Google Analytics or any other tool, unless I am particularly impatient with my operating colleagues, and I am more than happy to do it myself according to some methods, just to get a more accurate picture of the clicks. The practice is to?—— look at the next section.

Do your own click Heat map more reliable

In order to make an accurate click of the hot map, we need to ask the front-end engineers and students to help us do some of the early things, these things are important.

1. Help us add Google Analytics outside the chain monitor and Virtual page monitor. Some students said that I have used the event tracking instead of virtual page to monitor these JavaScript or flash interactions, so event tracking monitor the interaction can be shown on the click of the hot map? The answer is a pity. That's why I sometimes have to go back and use virtual page. For external chain monitoring, you can refer to an official article: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=11014&answer= 55527

2. Help us to mark different links with the same URL. There are two ways. The first method is to add different parameters after the same URL. For example, there are two links to: http://www.chinawebanalytics.cn/about_author/, technical colleagues can help us instead: Http://www.chinawebanalytics.cn/about_ Author/?from=navbar and Http://www.chinawebanalytics.cn/about_author/?from=footage to indicate that one is a link in the navigation bar, one is at the bottom of the link, Although their link addresses are http://www.chinawebanalytics.cn/about_author/, Google Analytics still records two different pages. The second method looks more advanced, is a foreigner proposed method, he wrote a program, you only need to customize, and then put on the page on it. Once the program is working properly, GA will put the data into the events report and automatically add a tail when capturing the links with the same URL. As shown in the following figure (click to see larger image):

This article has detailed introduction: Http://www.savio.no/blogg/a/102/how-to-track-multiple-links-to-the-same-url-automatically-in-google-analytics.

When the above two things are done, it is easy for you to make the heat map yourself. The basic report is to use the content–> Site content–> all pages–> navigation Summary. I have always felt a bit of regret in this report, which seems to be not particularly accurate and seems to be taking advantage of sampling data. If you choose the second method above 2, you will also need to refer to the events report. If you report with the Omniture next page, it's more accurate to make your own hot chart.

Sometimes we do not need to be specific to a click, but to give the area of the click Map, as shown above. Sometimes we also click on the image according to the crowd to get the behavior characteristics of different groups-after all, people on the Web page the most basic behavior is clicked.

Finally, a bonus: Creating a hot-click tool doesn't seem as complicated as we think, and if you want to do a hot-click tool yourself, see here: http://css-tricks.com/ tracking-clicks-building-a-clickmap-with-php-and-jquery/.

Well, the second episode is written here. If you feel that there is nothing to understand, there is nothing to do, think I have anything to write inaccurate, please tell me in the following message! Thank you very much!

This article copyright belongs to "website analysis in China CWA" and its author sing