online advertising heat maps May 8, 2008

After being invited to collaborate on the Interact Congress blog, I finally got to write my first post. You can link to it here or it’s repeated below. Let me know what you think.

Here’s an interesting new way to look at consumer engagement with your online advertising: clickmaps from FlashTalking.

Clickmaps are essentially a heat-map showing where consumers interact with your ad above and beyond regular click tag reporting. As regular readers of my blog will know, I’m a sucker for cool visualisations and relate more to pictures than stats.

The creative and strategic implication being that it helps us to garner better understanding of what drives consumer engagement. Or in regular parlance, draws the eye.

Here’s some examples. To make it work, use the fade option – fade out the map, watch or interact with the ad, finally fade the clickmap up again for the interaction view/heat map.

Sony Playstation – the Call To Action buttons seem to be getting the most of the action.

Virgin Mobile – clearly the opportunity to wax the guy and then wax him him more at the end wins out. Poor bugger.

Social networks – see the social media options, especially share trailer being high points of engagement.

I certainly know some peers and clients who would also appreciate this more visual representation of data than having to wade through reams of stats to the point where they’re pushing pins in their eyes for blessed relief. You get what’s working in an instant.

Be interested to know what you think.