How to know exactly where on your web page is the most valuable space to place your best offers.

• I have heard that there is a way to tell which portions of a web page are most likely to be viewed by my site visitors. I'm wondering if you can shed some light on this subject and perhaps tell me where I can learn more about this?

Answer: It sounds like you are referring to the so-called 'heat map' studies that provide a graphical representation of exactly where site visitors are looking by tracking their eyeballs or their click-activity on a webpage. The most available heat map is the one provided by Google and displayed on the right.

This map indicates, in general, the sections of a web page that people most readily focus on. The areas in orange tend to receive more attention than the areas in yellow or white. What this means is that you should strategically place your performance based ads or product offers within the orange colored sections.

Of course, your site may not neatly fall into line with this heat map and you must take into account Google's reason for providing this heat map. They are advocating that you display Google AdWords and the heatmap suggests optimum and secondary placement for such ads (i.e., orange and yellow sections). Therefore, we only recommend this as a general tool with some usefulness but certainly not the last word for your specific site.

If this is a topic that you wish to understand further (and we feel it is worthwhile for most sites to do so) then we recommend you become familiar with the study done by Marketing Sherpa. Their in-depth report (Landing Page Handbook $497) gives you much more detailed information and, unlike Google, tells the whole story without any vested interest as to how you should display *their* product. In addition, the study has been som...