There are some helpful and inexpensive marketing tools available that can help you test how people interact with your site.
FiveSecondTest
FiveSecondTest is all about getting user’s first impressions. Testers view your website, designs and/or mockups in the span of just 5 seconds and then answer your survey questions. Fivesecondtest sends you the results with analyzed responses including keywords and graphs.
One benefit to Fivesecondtest is that they have a free version if you offer to be the Guinea pig and participate in tests for others.
Fivesecondtest has two sister sites for specific tests including Navflow which provides feedback on how people navigate through your sites and Clicktest which provides feedback on how people engage with your web interfaces.
Feedback Army
While you don’t necessary get an entire army giving you feedback, this tool can provide a lot of responses for relatively low cost. You won’t get a lot of fancy graphs and charts, but you will get straightforward and direct answers.
Feedback Army provides you with answers to 4-6 questions that you set up pertaining to your website with a starting price point of $20 for 10 responses from reviewers. If you need fast answers about your site and you don’t need these responses to be too elaborate, you will find that Feedback Army works rather well.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg provides heat maps of your visitors based on where they click on your site as well as a scroll map that shows how far visitors scroll down your pages. There are several cool features including “Confetti” which color codes clicks by referral source.
UserTesting
UserTesting provides a video of someone stating his or her thoughts during a visit to your site and a summary of any problems that were encountered. This service also allows you to specify the demographics of your testers to match your website’s target audience.
This guest article was written by Pam Drayton, content writer for EmailFinder.com an email search service.