I attended two presentations last week that discussed tools that can be used to gain insight into how user behavior on landing pages can be tracked for optimization purposes; one by Dr. Tal Schwartz and another by Tim Ash.  As a psychology major, any way that analyzing how a user behaves on site and using this for optimization purposes, is very interesting to me.  They discussed various tools that allow you to analyze behavior using different means such as heat maps, conversion funnels, and form reporting.

Heat maps track where the attention patterns of users on a site through following both where the mouse cursor goes and also can track where the clicks on a page come from.  In more advanced tools visual attention is used directly.  This is useful because on any page there should be a goal of what you are trying to achieve.  This can be a form submission, taking a survey, buying a product, etc.  In many cases we saw that these goals do not necessarily align with where the attention of a user is focused.  The tool Attention Wizard uses a great model to predict this, and there is a free trial available.

Conversion funnel tracking is nothing new, but at the same time the importance of it should not be overlooked.  By setting goals and being able to analyze the various steps in this you can see where there may be a “broken part” in your conversion path.  Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to analyze things such as time on site, bounce rate, and conversion funnels.  Analyzing this you can see what pages on your site are working and which ones may be holding you back.

Form reporting deals with being able to track what parts of a lead capture form may be resulting in people dropping off from submitting it.  Two specific areas that are valuable are the ability to measure how long users are taking to fill out a specific field.  This can give insight into what fields may be confusing for users or that they are hesitant to fill out.  The second is a report that can let you see how often specific fields are left blank.  The shorter a form is the more likely someone is to fill it out.  So this can give insight into what questions can be omitting.  ClickTale is an affordable tool to be able to measure these metrics.

This is a just a quick peek at the tools out there to help with landing page optimization.  Very useful when you consider that getting someone to your site is only half the battle.  What they do once they get there is just as important.