The first part of this series identified some valuable ecommerce tools that help you keep a close eye on how well your website is performing. One of the most difficult parts of website analysis is processing big data and making sense of the results. This is referred to as visualization, and the following tips will help you make sense of the big data your website generates.

Visualize Your Keywords

You probably pay attention to keyword density when creating content for your website, but do you know what words actually appear most frequently in your content? Would you be surprised if your targeted keywords were actually not the words that stand out most on your site? Until you turn the words on your site into an image, it is hard to visualize your content as keywords.

You can use Wordle to create a cloud image representing the importance of each word on your website. You select text from your site and place it into Wordle, and the resulting image will make words that appear the most often larger than the surrounding words.

Get In Touch with Viewer Behavior

Your navigation system is one of the most important parts of your website. If it is not easy to find and use, your visitors may not make their way from the product pages to the checkout system. If you have elements on your website that are overlooked or distracting, then that can interfere with sales as well. You have to see how these elements of your page are interacting with your visitors in order to fix potential problems.

You can’t be a fly on the wall watching each visitor maneuver through your website, but there are ecommerce tools that show you what your users are doing while on your site. These tools are known as heat maps, and the best ones offered are Click Density and Crazy Egg.

Google’s overlay tool is also important because it allows you to follow users from one page of your site to another. This helps you determine what your content is compelling people to do. You want them to take a specific action after looking at each page, and this tool tells you if they are doing what you want them to do. From there, you can tweak your content to get better results.

Scrutinizer is another overlay type ecommerce tool, but it works by highlighting a given area of your website. It is intended to help you influence visitor behavior so that important areas of your website are more noticeable.

Prioritize Your Environment

Have you ever thought of your website as a living environment? If not, you may want to play with a tool called Feng GUI for a unique visualization experiment. Just as you might use feng shui to arrange the furniture in your home for maximum comfort, you can use this type of ecommerce tool to visualize the most prominent or attractive elements of your website. The tool uses a complicated algorithm to determine what elements of a website draw the eye.

While these e-commerce tools are fun to play around with and can give you some insightful information, there is no replacement for market research. Real people are still the best tools for visualization and visitor experience information.