CrazyEgg is a service that will help you visualize the usage of your website. How? Simple, by tracking visitor's activity on your pages. It shows you what's hot on your website, where users click and shows you very detailed information for each click by creating very detailed and graphically rich reports.
It has free and paid plans. Free plan is ideal to test this service. You can set up test for up to four pages and maximum number of 4000 clicks. Paid plans costs from 9$/month to 99$/month. I recommend you to start with free plan and then upgrade if you find this service useful. I believe you will.
What would be the benefit of using such a service? Instead of explaining, let's take a look at the sample tests I did. I tested this service using free plan by setting up three tests:
And here are the results.
Header and sidebar
Screenshot below shows that header links (logo and subscribe) have a good visibility and determined purpose. Also, links in sidebar are positioned properly, on expected positions. So test like this would tell me that there is nothing much to change here.
Post footer
In my case, the purpose of page footer is to summarize the article and to provide additional links such as social media buttons. What we can see from the two examples below is that recommended articles have a large number of clicks. Which is good. However, additional links didn't attracted attention of users. That means that I would redesign this section.
Page footer
In my case page footer takes a significant space. But, as you can see it is not much usable. In the example below (like in other two tests) users clicked on "recent posts" section and rarely on links in blogroll. However, none clicked on recent comment links. That means that the footer is another section that might be redesigned.
Main page
As the screenshot shows, main page servers its purpose, and that is to show a summaries of articles with emphasized titles and links.
Conclusion
Beside this information, CrazyEgg can show you a heatmap of page usage and "confetti diagram" as well. But I'll let you try this service and discover more.
As you saw in the examples in this article, this is a very useful tool that can show you a potential problems in layout and design. Please note that tests that I ran were very limited so the data shown in the examples is just for fun.
Enjoy testing!