http://www.leanmeanmarketing.com/where-to-get-heat-maps-for-free
Heat maps are absolutely necessary to not merely optimize your organization and your website but also that will help you understand your audience and what drives them, what motivates them, the things they like and what they dislike.
There are a lot of paid heat map services like Heatclicky and Visual Website Optimizer which is one which I like. A big a great free option if you're just getting started or if you would not have enough people to warrant spending 50, 60, 70, 80 dollars per month.
Google Analytics supplies a free basic heat map that's actually something that few people have knowledge of about. Granted it's not at all precisely the same quality you'll get from something such as Visual Website Optimizer, but it's pretty good and considering that it can be free, you can not argue with that.
Heat map within Google Analytics is not right on top page so you will need to dig in a small bit to discover it. But it is not hard and I provides you with instructions. It is going to present you with all of the important data like what number of clicks your links get, what parts of your web site are becoming probably the most actions and activities, and significant data that is displayed in the visual format that is ideal to consider.
If you are willing to upgrade as you either have an overabundance of traffic or else you should do even more advanced testing like multivariate or AB testing, it is possible to go along with something similar to Visual Website Optimizer. That is certainly actually what we should use for many in our websites and I honestly cannot complain whether it be in regards to the price, the service, or just the specific data that you will get back from this.
Second I must talk to you about is archive.org. It is just a fantastic resource for doing almost any research or competitor analysis given it provides screenshots of billions of websites at different deadlines. You can test the identical website from a couple of years ago and it will have different snapshots from different days and other months of the website with time. You can actually watch it change and you'll make your competitors' site change, get modified and updated with time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY50WPtsPko
