I learned about a new web traffic analysis tool, called ClickTracks, via Phil Windley’s weblog.

In a nutshell, this tool superimposes data from your web server logfiles onto your web pages to indicate percentage of traffic clicking on each link on a page. There are additional features for slicing and dicing the data but that’s the core of it. Here is a screen shot of an analysis of a couple days of traffic for High Context. (The percentages are rather low due to the fact that my rss feed is the most requested file on my site.)

Very cool and innovative software. But, how can this visual data be analyzed to improve your web site? Clicktracks doesn’t offer any suggestions on their site (they should for marketing purposes alone).

A couple of thoughts I have on how to use the results:

• Identifying which regions of your page design tend to get the most clicks;
• Analyzing click patterns after a user observation session (you would have to isolate the traffic on a test site so other traffic doesn’t get into the data set);
• Visual display of data for the quantitativiely challenged.

It certainly isn’t a replacement for standard log analysis reports but it could be a useful tool for usability studies and alternate display of data. Might even be worth $495 they are charging for it.