When it comes to web site stats, context is everything.

Generally, web stats tend to focus on the big picture and overall trends - most popular pages, main entry points, number of visits, that kind of thing. The context here is overall site performance.

But what about individual pages? How are people interacting with your design? What links are people clicking? How is your carefully designed navigation actually being used, if at all?

In this context, stats overlays can be really useful. Overlays show what percentage of users clicked a link on a specific page in the context of the page itself. The more complex your site, the more important it is to see how that precious screen real estate is being used.

Want a real world example? On a larger site I worked on, we had a left hand column of well organised navigation links. Every now and again this section would be the subject of heated debate. Would it be confusing to add more links here? Can we take some out?

After checking out the stats overlays, it turned out hardly anyone used them at all, despite them being such a conventional thing to have in a design. So they went. That’s what you need to know - good stats cut through all those assumptions and get to the meat of the issue - is anyone actually using them?

Stats overlays used to be the domain of high end web stats applications. However now there are a few products that offer them for free. I’m going to give a quick overview of two of them - Crazy Egg and MapSurface.

These certainly aren’t the only tools to offer these features. Google Analytics (free, but you need to request an invitation) for instance offers this feature, however it hasn’t worked out of the box for me on my dynamic sites. ClickTracks also offers a free version of their stats software called ClickTracks Appetizer (though you’d never tell from their site).

But back to Crazy Egg and MapSurface.

Crazy Egg ads have been appearing everywhere in design circles. Their product, however, is still “Coming soon”, and has been for months. I registered my interest ages ago but have never heard anything. Devlounge wrote up a preview earlier this month, and unfortunately it sounds quite limited. It doesn’t appear to collect stats on a continuous basis - you have to create ‘sessions’ which last for 14 days or 100,000 clicks. Presumably their business model will involve a ‘pro’ version that allows continuous tracking and more advanced features.

Thing is, you can already get continuous, javascript based stats tracking with an overlay feature already. Glenn Jones has been plugging away at his MapSurface app for a while now, and its well worth trying out. Andy Budd wrote up a review back in February.

MapSurface doesn’t have the fancy heatmap overlay, but it does everything else. It has the normal overlay of course, plus visit, referrer, searches and outgoing link tracking, which makes it one handy widget. Plus with a simple key press you can activate it on any page of your site at any time.

Why wait for Crazy Egg when you can sign up for MapSurface now? If you don’t like it, just take out the line of javascript, and you’re done.

If hosted services aren’t your thing, Glenn has posted a downloadable version of his original AJAX link tracker too (there’s also a php/mysql version).

These tools do have their limits. The biggest objection is that these kinds of stats don’t tell you why a user clicked a certain link. What were they looking for? Did they find it? Its possible to have a scenario where you have a lot of users clicking on a link only to be disappointed with page they wind up at. High click thru rates aren’t the same as successful click thrus.

Also, with MapSurface at least, you have to activate it on every page. To browse your site with stats visible at all times, I highly recommend checking out ClickTracks Appetizer or one of their paid products, especially if you run a content-rich site.

To conclude, being able to read a report of what’s popular is one thing, being able to see how people are interacting with your site on a page-by-page basis is quite another. Statistics overlay are a novel way to see this information, and you can either wait for Crazy Egg, or check it out right now with MapSurface.

If you have a stats app (hosted or not) you are particularly fond of, feel free to post about it in the comments!