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Click analytics is a powerful technique that displays what and where users are clicking on a webpage helping libraries to easily identify areas of high and low usage on a page without having to decipher website use data sets. Click analytics is a subset of web analytics, but there is little research that discusses its potential uses for libraries. This paper introduces three click analytics tools, Google Analytics' In-Page Analytics, ClickHeat, and Crazy Egg, and evaluates their usefulness in the context of redesigning a library's homepage.
Editor's Note: This paper is adapted from a presentation given at the 2010 LITA Forum
Web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, assist libraries in interpreting their website usage statistics by formatting that data into reports and charts. The web services librarian at the Kraemer Family Library at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs wanted to use website use data to reassess the Library's homepage that was crowded with redundant links. For example, all the links in the site's dropdown navigation were repeated at the bottom of the homepage to make the links more noticeable to the user, but it unintentionally made the page long. To determine which links the web services librarian would recommend for removal, she needed to compare the use or clicks the repetitive links received. At the time, the Library relied solely on Google Analytics to interpret website use data. However, this practice proved insufficient because Google Analytics cannot discern between the same link repeated in multiple places on a webpage. Furthermore, she wanted to use website use data to determine the areas of high and low usage on the Library's homepage, and use this information to justify her webpage reorganization decisions. Although this data can be found in a Google Analytics report, the web services librarian found it difficult to easily identify the necessary information within the massive amount of data the reports contain.
The web services librarian opted to use click analytics, also known as click density analysis or site overlay, a subset of web analytics that reveals where users click on a webpage.1 A click analytics report produces a visual representation of what and where visitors are clicking on an individual webpage by overlaying the click data on top of the...