Last week we covered a story about Malware & SEO hacking hits UK government, schools & universities which ended up on the front page of Digg.
Ritchie the author of the post has emailed me the following image (they use some kind of heat map package) showing that visitors from Digg seem to click like mad anywhere on the page even when no links are present.
Considering social media visitors only visit for a few seconds we can only conclude that they arrive on the page and then click frantically for 3 seconds before leaving again.
Image credit Online Backup Technology
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
Doesn’t really show a lot without comparison to a normal page.
True Alex. But most heatmaps usually have the majority of the clicks on things that look like links,buttons or images.
When I open a link on some page – especially if it is opened in a frame – I tend to click into the opened window to make sure that I can use the scrolling wheel of my mouse. That may explain the clicks on “not even text” areas.
I also “tripleclick” on text passages to mark the paragraph I currently read as selected (usually white text on blue background). Just makes it much easier to not get lost at linebreaks, because I always have a “close reference” (“I was at the second line of the marked block, so now I have to go to the third one”). That’s especially true for pages with bad typography (long paragraphs or “several” paragraphs with no whitespace inbetween).
But that’s not the Digg front page. Maybe I’ve missed something, or is it talking about all pages after a Digg story, which could mean millions of combinations of pages. Or is it just talking about that page in particular, in which case it could be an anomaly.
Agree with Luke, we need some comparison!
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@foaf You are right that isn’t THE Digg front page (that would be a really interesting heat map) – it’s a page that hit the Digg front page and received a lot of traffic as a result. It’s just an image showing clicks on that one page in particular.
@Dominik I do that too and that’s probably the cause, especially on a long page like this one.
More comments from Patrick Altoft@Dominik Yeah that makes a lot of sense. You tend to do that more on long pages. I suppose as well that sometimes you highlight or doubleclick a word or phrase to search it on google (especially in Firefox).
As alluded to above, I tend to click when I read and highlight certain bits so I can keep my place in the text. That would explain those random clicks and might also suggest that a large majority of Digg users are technically savvy Internet users.
“Considering social media visitors only visit for a few seconds we can only conclude that they arrive on the page and then click frantically for 3 seconds before leaving again.”
ha, they must be too confused!
LOL! that doesn’t seem correct, I never made much money from adsense when I got tonnes of traffic from Digg (and stumbleupon).
Hi,
Diggers do clip blindly to generate more money .But why they couldn’t be traced out?
Isn’t blue where people don’t click ? (And red where they click according to the reference on the top left corner)…That would suggest that Digg users do not click frantically but leave the page without clicking anywhere.
Patrick, I think the blue dots on where there is no link should be taken carefully. Because of different screen sizes, and maybe the JS script cannot “normalize” to one width, the heatmap show dots anywhere apparently. If you make the orthogonal projection on the vertical axis of each blue dot, chances are they will cross a link. And maybe as Dominik said, it may be a focus click.
If you didn’t want them to click on an area of the page all you would have to do is put an ad unit there
Another possibility is that the clicks could be representing user interactions with other applications. IM text windows and turning off screensavers, for example, would require clicking back to the browser to continue surfing, resulting in random clicks anywhere on the page.
The reason so many clicks are on the left side is people bringing up their right click windows.
I have a feeling that most of those are middle-button clicks for scrolling down the page to asses it’s value.
assess, lol
Funny how few click there are in the right side menu.
Well…. i have seen such kind of posts before and the only thing which i realized again and again that these diggers do clip madly and rapidly just to generate more money…..but the solution is still undiscovered, isn’t there any source to find them out……?
More comments from Jennifer JohnsonDoes not look like clicks to me but appears to be where the mouse pointer ends up at. Most user put the pointer to the side so that the arrow icon doesn’t interfere with the text. Also, it appears that users are using the mouse icon to track the text as they read.
What is quite interesting is the lack of clicks on the links down the right hand side. Also there are no clicks on the picture of the 2 men on computers – even though there are clicks just to the left of it.
And the big button links, just below the banner, people are not clicking on the text that tells them what the button actually is. Like they are reading the button as they click it.
How weird.
- The really light blue dot by the first letter of the article “H” is probably people copy-pasting.
{ 2 tweetbacks }
Heatmap of Digg … get fractal http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/heatmap-digg-frontpage/
[feed] Heatmap of a Digg front page – Diggers blindly click on anything: Last week we covered a story abou.. http://tinyurl.com/kjohn3
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