If you're an Omniture SiteCatalyst user, you should be familiar with ClickMap, a browser plug-in for IE or FireFox that creates visual overlays to show you which links on your website are being clicked. ClickMap makes it easy to see and understand how visitors are interacting with navigation options you provide on your web pages - and I've never seen a case where that information didn't create an urgent desire to make some obviously needed changes.

But ClickMap has some 'hidden' capabilities. With a simple phone call you can enable a visual display of Revenue, Cart activity, Conversion stats, and more. Now beyond just seeing what links users are clicking, you can see which links are making you money. And if you thought clicks were motivating, what until you see dollar signs (or the lack of them).

The reason for the phone call is that, apparently, tracking and calculating this incremental information takes up processing power and storage space and so the good folks at Omniture don't bother tracking this stuff unless you ask them.

I'm sure a huge number of accounts and users don't even use ClickMap and so I can understand why the want to avoid burning cycles on data that isn't ever going to get looked at. On the other hand, recent experience suggests that many accounts don't even know these capabilities are available and therefore miss out on something that is a very great and obvious benefit of SiteCatalyst. A little 'prefs' button with the ability to enable additional tracking options in a simple 'ClickMap Admin' dialog box sure would be nice.

One of my favorite uses for ClickMap or RevenueMap is to instigate the death of the big dumb graphic. You know, those 16:9-style images that take up half to two-thirds of the pixels on a page while 'defining an image' or 'romancing the brand' or 'setting the tone' or whatever other inane justification is put forth, proving nothing more than the person in charge used to work in either paper-catalogs or at an advertising agency.

RevenueMap tests the will of these people by putting their superstitions up against good old fashioned greed. Looking at these fabulous images showcased for what they really are - huge areas of your web page where you are making absolutely no money - barriers which force visitors into the horizontal or vertical navigation bars which they're proven to detest as their only means of escape (except of course the every-present BACK button).

Of course it's also extremely useful in less philosophical situations. A typical catalog directory with a 4 × 6 grid of product images looks very different when you suddenly see that one or two items are pulling in huge percentages of the revenue and three or four are completely bombing. Is the problem the product, the offer, the promotion, the photography, etc - who knows. But this data visualization starts those questions being asked. Is there another product that could become 'promoted' into one of these more visible slots which would take better advantage of the space? Suddenly it's becomes a priority to figure that out.

ClickMap/RevenueMap is a great tool, and even better when used in tandem with Next Page Flow (which is conveniently accessible right from the ClickMap tray) which gives you an equally visual but altogether different view based on where visitors go. Follow these paths, or use PathFinder or Fallout to learn what becomes of people who take the various paths on a page, and you can usually find some prominent links that just never lead to very good outcomes. So why leave them there?

With Revenue enabled in ClickMap, and the 'Display Conversions' option selected, we get this informative box telling us how much we made, how this use of pixels did relative to all the others on the page, and what each raw click turned out to be worth. Note that all the numbers in this example have been changed to respect confidentiality (in case you recognize that jacket).