If you have a lot of traffic on your pages and you want to know exactly what your users look for and how they act on your pages: there are great free tools on the market to help you with that:
Google analytics: The tracking and analysis of your site with Google Analytics is a basic requirement to find out about your traffic sources, the keywords you are listed for and what your top pages are. We use Analytics on tradebit to find out about the needs of our visitors BEFORE they reach our site: referal analytics and keyword listings.
Now much more information and typical design errors we implement while working on tradebit are NOT unveiled by the Google tool. So I looked around for a “heat map” analytics tool, which should show me, where the users click when they land on tradebit!
Heat map analytics: I found a tool which is promoted in the Drupal universe of software tools called ClickHeat from Labsmedia.
It produces a heatmap for your site like this:

which gives you a good idea of your pages performance and where to optimize conversion. It helps you and the surfer and that is a good win-win situation!
The configuration of ClickHeat is quite simple: You need to have a PHP enabled webserver and you upload and unpack the archive into your web directory. Make sure you set:
your-server/clickheat/config
your-server/clickheat/cache
your-server/clickheat/logs
as read/write enabled, because ClickHeat needs to store info in these directories.
The snippet you need to insert into your pages is provided by the web frontend of ClickHeat once you logged in. To make it work right, you may define GROUPS of pages and the domain name you want to analyze. That can be done dynamically via PHP.
You may post comments, if you are facing problems with the tool, I think I have it under control
There are also many tweaks and packages for other standard software packages out - like Tom Mollerus’ ColdFusion implementation or a package for Drupal, which is also very useful!
