Install ClickHeat for vBulletin
ClickHeat is a wonderful tool used to track what section of your pages are “hot-zones” and then you can take this newly found knowledge and monetize your site better with it. The trick is being able to break down each page to see what area’s get the most clicks, and what area’s users avoid with their mice!
First you’ll need to download and install ClickHeat, after that upload all the files to your server in a folder called clickheat, it doesn’t have to be inside your vBulletin forums or anything special, just as long as you can access it from your web browser you’ll be fine.
Next follow their instructions on runing the install and all that fancy stuff. It’s really simple, as a matter of fact there isn’t even much to it, just point your browser to yoursite.com/clickheat/index.php and follow the instructions there.
After you’ve got clickheat setup, and all your information configured, its time to setup some page zones, and place the code in vBulletin to track where everyone is clicking. First login as your vBulletin admin account, and click on the JavaScript link in the top right corner. Then a new page sort of drops down, and you’re going to enter some information here.
The first page we’re going to track is forumhome or index. So leave the group name as index for now, and grab the javascript code it puts out, and get ready for some fun. Next login to your vBulletin AdminCP area, and navigate yourself to your theme manager where you can edit templates. Open the forumhome template and at the very top after <head> you’ll want to place the javascript code you just copied.
Wala, you’re now tracking your index page of the forums. But this isn’t good enough as there are other pages you want to monetize as well. Go back to the first steps, and instead of index as the group name, enter forumdisplay. Again right after the <head> tag, enter your new javascript code for forumdisplay and paste it into the template. Repeat the process one last time for the SHOWTHREAD template.
This will give you some basic click stats of probably your high traffic area’s. Give clickheat some time to run and compile a few logs of these pages, and check back to ensure everything is working properly. After about 7-10 days you should start to have a nice heatmap for your forum pages of where your users are clicking.
You can see our clickheat maps at our test installation user: clickheat pass: clicker to see exactly what you’ll get.
In a later post we’ll break down how to turn this data into some serious cash for you!
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