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August 24, 2006
Custom clickmaps
Custom clickmaps: Where do people click on your webpages? Here's a set of rolled routines to visualize it... uses a simple JavaScript event handler to log click locations, then serverside image generation to create an alpha overlay which you can view on-demand in your own browser... red-tinted areas get the most clicks, down through orange, yellow, blue-green etc. Handy. But clicks are just one thing to measure -- SWF ads can already track mouse motion (not just clicks) -- some groups use eyetracking equipment to discover how people look at a page -- the inputs can be expanded over the simple JavaScript click detector. Then the display could be expanded too -- instead of just displaying aggregate values as a color we could slice things up by time or pageversions (Google Measure Map and Yahoo Finance currently use such time-controls in SWF displays), or creating rollover maps with dependencies ("ok, all those people who rolled over the left navbar, where'd they end up going next?") -- interactivity which goes beyond what a static PNG can fulfill. A background-transparent SWF displayed using the browsers' WMODE compositing style is already used as an overlay layer in many ads. Do you know of any current SWF-based work in creating heatmaps to help visualize user activity like this...?
Posted by JohnDowdell at August 24, 2006 02:17 PM
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