When your landing page is setup and you begin to drive traffic to your site, you will want to evaluate how your page is doing. Apart from outright conversions and testing, I think heat maps are an excellent way to measure how visitors click on your page and analyze their user experience.
A heat map is simply an overlay of your website that shows where users are clicking through color-coded dots. The more the clicks the more the heat 
Who provides this service?
There are a handful of companies that offer this, here are just three of them:
ClickDensity
Simple and straightforward for your basic heat map needs. The have a free trial as well as a starter package for just $5/month! Good for first timers. These are the guys I currently use. Here is the site – clickdensity
CrazyEgg
Very popular right now, as I see a lot of advertising for them. Offers a little more with their confetti feature, pretty nifty. They also have a free trial with their intro package at just $9/month. Here is their site – crazyegg
ClickTale
This company offers an interesting twist besides your basic heat map, they have actual recorded footage of each users mouse movements so you can track how the user moves and clicks. You can watch individual visitor sessions to really understand user behavior! Go and check them out … clicktale
So How do you use Heat Maps?
The information alone given by heat maps can help you optimize your site to give your user a better experience and hopefully increase conversions. Here are some of the more basic uses:
- Identify layout issues
- See which links are popular
- See where users aren’t clicking
- See where users shouldn’t be clicking
- Helps to split test landing pages
So I hope you can see how you can use heat maps to streamline your website. While this is the last day in our 10 Day Landing Page series, it is by no means exhaustive! I hope you enjoyed the series. Let me know what you think …
Be on the lookout, as I plan to post a nice little tool to help with your landing page quality score very soon!
Here is another option that I’ve used once or twice so far with great results – http://www.phpmyvisites.us
Free analytics and heatmaps and it is self hosted.