Do You Want To Know Where Your Visitors Click Most?
There’s no such thing like fashion! If trend setters howl, their followers would bark.
This applies also to blogging. About one year ago, a few big blogs launched the trend of the cute, little 125×125 ad boxes displayed on the right sidebar, in pairs.
As far as I’ve read in forum threads, most bloggers and blog readers like them, and they appreciate the blogs which display them. The big problem is that small bloggers cannot find advertisers for those spots, so they jumped into Project Wonderful, hoping that finally they’ll have a steady income secured.
But have you ever thought how efficient are those banners for the advertisers?
CrazyEgg: A Free Way To Check Where Your Readers Click
We’ve run a test here, at EzMoneyOn.Net, with the aim of seeing which are the most clicked areas of our front page. We used CrazyEgg, a service which is free for maximum 5000 pageviews per month.
After you sign up and define the URL you want to test, you’ll get a code which you have to include in your blog’s code for the page you want to test (you can put the code n the footer section, for example). You can set your test either for a number of visits, or for a time period. When it ends, you are announced by email, and you can see your statistics. Here you can see the results of our test:
You see some light areas on the heatmap: those are the areas which were clicked. The lighter and bigger they are, the bigger was the number of clicks recorded in that area. How many do you see on the nice 125×125 banners? None, nik, nada, niente! We ran the test for 7 days. How much would you pay for an ad nobody clicks on?
Let’s take a look a bit down the page. This is the heatmap:
If you were tempted to say that usually people don’t pay attention to the right side of a layout, forget about it: the Recent Comments section has been clicked, and those are not our own clicks.
Anyway, if you want to discover the most effective way to place elements like ads or text links in your page template, you can do some split tests with CrazyEgg, and choose the best performers. As an example of test, we could now switch the two sidebars on this page, run the test again and see if the click rate on the banners has improved.
You can even use such tests to show advertisers that your banners are clicked 
What do you think? Why are those 125×125 spots so hard to sell?
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An excellent analysis, Simone. I tested some of these myself on a few blogs – I had however better results than you. I suppose the “selling” has a lot to do with the design of the banner and whether the advertised product or service covers a real need.
For example, in your test, I see a lot of clicks on the “A” – that means that people are curious and puzzled by the apparition of a simple letter that has nothing to do with the rest of the pag. A simple, yet somehow effective ad. I am not sure how successful the landing page is and the scope puzzled me a little, but the banner is effective. It’s the design that makes it effective, not the position. You can try moving that banner with all the 125×125 banners and replace it with something that actually brings you money if people click (like one of the affiliate banners) – that’s a test worth considering.
Thank you, Mig. That “A” banner is a proof that creativity in advertising actually works. That placement is one of the worst, and yet people click. We will surely play around some more with such tests, as we don’t have a huge amount of traffic yet, so we don’t lose too much even if we get rid of all affiliate banners.
Yes, I have used CrazyEgg in the past, it’s very useful tool online. I removed it later once done the analysis, to just get my website loading faster.
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I agree with you, there’s no point in keeping the code when you don’t use it. And you can reinstall it any time you wish to test something again.
Wow – Never thought about this. Might wanna sign up on this service and see what my viewers have been clicking on! That’d be really interesting. Thanks for sharing!
You are welcome. Please come back after you do the test and tell us how was it: were your readers clicking most where you expected?