Must tell you about Crazy Egg.

Check out Crazy Egg.

It's an amazing analytics application that can help you analyze your website or blog. The coolest thing is a heat map that shows you where on your homepage (for example) people click. The "confetti" option shows you individual clicks. The overlay shows you specifics on each individual element of your page. And, you can get a list of where the clicks come from. Archive all your reports or get them via RSS. All of that is the free stuff - upgrade and you get to share your data with others (eg in your organization), and get live reports.

Here's how it works.

So how would you use this?

Well, when I ran a week-long test on my blog home page, it enabled me to see how many people visited the page over that time frame. I could see that it looks like I use a good number of links, e.g. not too many, because people click on them regularly. Lots of people click on my license plate picture to get to my "about me" page - which is great because I took that (and my "subscribe" links) off the sidebar and into a completely new page, which could have been a mistake. And it showed me which of my widgets people actually click on and which they don't. (And y'all know how much I love widgets! I like to change them up all the time and this can help me keep them fresh.) My new blogroll with live rss links to my favorite bloggers is a big hit, which means others are getting traffic from me (yay!). PITV is getting traffic from my site. People are looking at archived posts, are joining YAP, are checking out my JOTT feeds.

Just think how useful it could be for your association's home page. It could help you see if people are reading your association blog and clicking on links, but it could do way more than that. Have a fundraising module? It could help you figure out if anyone's clicking on it, and if not, you could stop wasting time with it and try moving it somewhere more prominent or doing something new. Have a newsroom? See how popular it is. Have a conference section? If everyone's going straight there, maybe it's time to have a full conference website. These are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head, but seriously, this app is the bee's knees. Try it and see for yourself!