Looking at your stats can give you a pretty good idea of how your visitors are using your site and which content they are finding, but sometimes it would be helpful to know a little more information. Setting up a heat map can help you determine which parts of the page are most prominent and are  the best at attracting clicks.

A heat map is basically a small script that tracks exactly where your users click and presents it to you as an overlay on your page, so you can see where the clicks are most dense ("hottest") and where they are non-existant ("coolest").The colors that are overlaid on your page when you are viewing the stats run from transparent to blue to red, indicating an increasing number of clicks as the colors get warmer.

This can be especially useful on a homepage, to test the effectiveness of a current layout, and can also be used to determine which links are most prominent in cases where there are multiple links to the same page. For example, your non-profit may have a "donate" option in the main menu and also a separate "donate" button further down in the right hand column. A heat map can tell you which of the two gets clicked more. Similarly, you may be interested in learning whether users prefer to click on the title of a recent blog entry or on the "Read more" link.

There are a number of commercial heat map options out there which can cost from $10 per month and up into the hundreds. ClickHeat is an open source heat map script that is available for free if you are interested in doing some testing. You can set it up temporarily to learn about how your homepage is being used, or leave it on indefinitely so you can check in periodically. The script can be downloaded from Sourceforge and you can find some instructions and a demo from Labs Media (ClickHeat's developers).*

It's also worth noting that there is a corresponding Drupal module available (Click HeatMap) and a Joomla plugin (Clickheat) to integrate ClickHeat into your Drupal or Joomla site more easily.

*One note about ClickHeat: The default script that it provides for you to embed in your page or template includes a textual link in the <noscript> area which can be removed if you wish. In the case of a user that comes to your site with Javascript turned off, this will not degrade gracefully as it will add a link to LabsMedia commercial site on your homepage, which is probably not what you want. It's disappointing that they have done this since it's basically a sneaky way for LabsMedia to try to increase their search engine rank by surreptitiously adding external links to unsuspecting sites. Luckily it is easily removed.

Hat tip to Smashing Mag