Do you know what your visitors are doing on your site? You should.

If you're going to be successful in selling your product or service, you need to present it in the best way possible. Frequently this involves finding out little things you can change about the product or it's presentation in order to better entice visitors to buy it. In a traditional store, you can just watch visitors move around your store and see what displays are more appealing and which features your visitors get hung up on. On the internet, things aren't so simple. You can't just watch over someone's shoulder as they're clicking on things on your website and it's very difficult to find out what people might not like about it.

Tracking click activity is a great way to find out what's working on your site and what isn't.

Using click tracking with your WordPress based site is a great way to gain insights into what's going right and how you can improve your marketing strategies. Click tracking in WordPress is very easy and you probably already have some data available to you through popular tools and plugins. Once you have the tracking data, you can make some simple tweaks to improve your conversion rates and hopefully drastically increase user interaction. If you have one style of button that is being clicked on much more frequently than another style, now you know that you should always use the more popular style. If you have two very similar call-out areas but one is performing much better, examine the copy and see if you can rewrite the underperforming area to be more appealing. If you have other ideas for how to leverage click tracking to make your content more appealing, get in touch

Setting up click tracking on your WordPress site.

There are two popular tools that you're probably already using that do some limited click tracking. The first one is the JetPack plugin which has a Site Stats module. Jetpack keeps track of some of the more popular content on your site but I've always found the tracking ability to be a little lacking. You can see the tracking info from JetPack by clicking "Site Stats" under the JetPack label in your admin menu.

The other popular tool is Google Analytics. If you already have been using GA for event tracking then you know how to use ga.js to set up events. Simply add an event for any given click on the website and record what was clicked on.

Personally, my favorite way to track clicks in WordPress is with the WP Click-Track plugin. It provides you with a great interface for seeing what's being clicked on, how many clicks you're seeing per day and when people are clicking(sorted by hour and day of the week). Install the plugin straight from the codex, wait a few hours or a week(depending on how popular your site is) and start watching the incredibly useful statistics pour in. I don't believe the plugin is being actively developed anymore but it's still fantastic. I've included a link to a stable version above.

What's next?

Well, now that you have all of this information on what's popular and what's not, experiment with making the things you want people to click on more prominent. Change the working, add a splash of color and make your call-out buttons bigger. If you have the time, A/B testing page designs can be incredibly useful. You can then get statistics on two different designs at once and compare the results from each. A very useful plugin for that is the Max A/B plugin. Check it out and start testing!

If you want to go all crazy town on it...

There is a way to basically watch exactly what people are doing on your site but it doesn't work so well. I wouldn't recommend this if your site is very popular or if you're not a developer. A pretty easy way to get real-time data out of users is by using socket.io or by writing your own websockets script. In this example, you could set up a node.js server that only displays one page to you. Then include the socket.io script on the same-looking page on your real website. Include another script on that page on your website that sends an event containing the mouse's coordinates to the node server every time a visitor's mouse moves. Then just create an image of a mouse on your fake website and have it move to those coordinates every time data is received. This is not a very effective way to track users but it would show you exactly where people are moving their mouse on one single page. If you have a better idea for how to accomplish this, send me a message. I'd love to hear it!