Heatmaps are used for testing and research purposes. They can be applied to many different fields and web design and usability testing are just two of them. There are different types, some track the focus of your eyes on a webpage or there are others that will track clicks on a page.  Damien Mulley has a great example of heat maps generated based on the movement of eyes around a webpage and they can give you some very valuable information. In Damien’s example below you can see that users mainly focus on the top three results in Google:

Today I want to show you how you can setup heatmaps for free on your website to track clicks on your webpage.  You can see from the image below, it will show clicks on the page which can give you valuable info that you mightn’t already be tracking like, is the search function being used on the site?, are people viewing your twitter profile. etc.?

The tool I use is called ClickHeat and it is opensource. To set it up just download it from the site, upload it to your server and follow the installation process (which is very simple). Finally add the javascript to your template to enable tracking.

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