But computers don’t have free will; as long as there’s juice, they should be working. So why is the Internet full of lazy computers? Why do I have to do the same work over and over every time I visit a website?
Let me describe my browsing…

Crazyegg, a traffic statistics website, launched a new section to their service called Confetti. It allows you to track each individual click on your website. You can also track clicks individual clicks based on referrers, search terms, operating sys…

When you click something, we figure out what you clicked and where on that thing you clicked it. We don’t use absolute x/y pixel coords, but a scalable relative coordinate system.

Imagine a picture of a car that scales dynamically. Every single visitor would see that image at a slightly different size and shape. Now imagine that all of them clicked all 4 of the headlights. Maybe they even resized their window every time they clicked.

Now when you view your report, you should expect to see that the headlights have been clicked no matter what size the image renders for you in the reports. And that is exactly what you’d see. Even if you resize your window, change your font size etc…

Our reports dynamically watch for things to change their positioning while your even viewing your report and then update the positions of the data accordingly. Without having to reload your reports.

And the system we use for images and links and divs and everything is the same. So font sizes and window sizes and dynamic content and everything else REALLY doesn’t matter. We don’t just fudge the data afterward to make it seem like it’s following the elements. Our system doesn’t even have to think about it. It just works.

Just try it for yourself.

And, even with tracking at element level, font-size CAN have some effect. For example, a text hyperlink will change size with different font settings, but tracking X/Y relative to the link will not negate the different dimensions of the link. Which is why we also record the font-size setting as one of our metrics.

All those other ones that try to do Heatmaps track clicks on a page basis, which means that if users have even slightly different font settings, window sizes, etc… it makes your data totally meaningless since they can’t match those clicks back up to the elements that got clicked.

I know that seems like really basic and necessary functionality, but those “other guys” take the easy way out and then add all these other random features to compensate for the fact that their data is total carp.

ClickHeat is a great example of sometghing that looks like it works, until you actually try to use it, then you realize that the data is absolutely useless.

Text Size doesn’t put “a lot of noise” into these statistics, mainly because very few people change their default text size:

http://www.clickdensity.com/Text-Sizes-Study.aspx

Either way, it’s easy enough to filter out.

Dan

That must be putting a lot of noise into the statistics… anyone any experience with this?

Just because the initial post sounds a little biased, thought it was worth pointing out that clickdensity has had similar ‘filtering’ options (although not with coloured blobs) since launch, 12 months ago. This includes filtering by click time, screen resolution, link/no link, browser, goal page, etc.

This is certainly an interesting space to be competing in.