Tom Mollerus' Weblog

At work we've been trying to figure out how best to use Eloqua, which is a campaign management and lead-tracking tool. Like many other services, Eloqua offers email and webinar campaign management, but it also adds something of great value-- the ability to track your leads' activities from the email or webinar through your web site. So, not only can you tell just which leads opened your email newsletter and attended your webinar broadcast, but you can see whether they've registered on your site, or downloaded a demo of your product. Many other campaign management tools will send out email campaigns for you, but don't offer that kind of end-to-end user tracking.

So Eloqua is great at tracking unique user behavior.. but it's not very good at aggregate reporting and graphing. The process of making a chart is painfully slow, and you can't choose your time intervals-- you're pretty much limited to showing aggregate activity per day instead of per week or per month. I'm sorry, Eloqua folks; this makes finding trends from your data well nigh impossible.

Around the same time, we started implementing Google Analytics so that we could at least get a look at some aggregate trends. Google produces beautiful reports, but only for web page views, where Google's JavaScript code can be embedded and sent down to the user's browser. This means, on the surface, that you can't track downloads.

Or so I thought. But then I found something in the Google Analytics help docs which made me realize that you can track downloads. And with a little bit of creative thinking, I realized that you could use the same technique not only to track actual requested URLs, but contrived URLs that represented any data you wanted to track.

Colin suggested some smart changes for my Clickheat for ColdFusion project, which I've duly commited. Here goes:

• In settings.cfm, I've taken my own email address out. [Doh!]
• In click.cfm, I've replaced hard-coded email addresses in the CFCATCH with the email variables from settings.cfm.
• In click.cfm, I've replaced GetDirectoryFromPath() with VARIABLES.logPath from settings.cfm.
• In index.cfm, I've changed the form action to index.cfm instead of view.cfm.
• In clickheat.js, I've changed URL paths which refer to the root so that they're relative to the root, so that the application will work correctly in any location off the root.

I'm finally ready to share ClickHeat for ColdFusion with the rest of the community. It's a port of Labsmedia's original ClickHeat project, which is written in PHP. ClickHeat shows you where users are clicking on your pages: which links, which graphics, which nav items.

ClickHeat has two main parts: a JavaScript which tracks click coordinates and sends them via AJAX to a .cfm page which saves the information to a log file; and an application which reads the log file and converts it to a click map or heat map. A heat map creates a fuzzy, color-coded map telling you where the greatest amount of click activity occurs on your page (cooler blues indicate less activity, while brighter yellows and reds indicate more activity).

You can check out ClickHeat in my projects section. Please let me know what you think or if you run into any problems using the code.

Have you ever gotten into a discussion (or perhaps even an argument) with a colleague or client over the effectiveness of one particular feature of your web application? Goodness knows I have. The good news is that if you can both agree that the end goal is to serve your site's users, then there's a solution: A/B split testing.