Numbers Vs Pictures

I've worked with web analytics for a number of years now, the majority of the time for a major high street bank, and have found that the focus for a lot of effort (especially within marketing teams) has always been the number of times that a link has been clicked. I've more recently been working with the clickdensity software from Box UK, with some interesting results, since the output here is pictures rather than numbers.

Some quick things that I've found are:

• Using numbers shows the number of times a link has been clicked only
• Pictures show you where the click was made (in the case of a hyperlinked picture, whether the click was on a face, words, on the edge, in the middle, and so on)
• Pictures show you instances of people clicking where they believe something should be hyperlinked and isn't - something that numbers alone would miss completely
• Senior managers get much more excited by pictures than they do by numbers

So it appears that there is some value in using this form of analysis within an eCommerce business......

Working recently on some analysis for a museum website, the third point above became extremely pertinent. The museum was interested by the number of clicks they were getting to there navigation toolbars, but in fact the majority of clicks were being made on the banner image directly below. By hyperlinking this image, the museum has manage to improve click through rates significantly.

Of course, no business can be run without the numbers to support decisions, but it seems that there may be some very good supplementary tools available to give web analysis an extra level of detail.