FoldSpy to measure 20 million screens
21st of October 2007 by conor
Eoghan McCabe launched FoldSpy back in July and they will soon measure their 20 millionth screen. The tool is designed to tell you what your visitors are seeing so you can optimise ad placements.
Web users spend far more time at the top of a page than at the bottom, so the top of the page is more valuable when placing ads or other page elements. Using FoldSpy, you can find out exact where this top is and you can make design adjustments accordingly.
I hadn't fully understood the tool until I tried it out. You add one line of code to your site's page headers to enable it. Then to see it in action, you simply go to www.yoursite.com/#foldspy. There you get an overlay on your site showing what percentage of measured users (on all sites) could see particular areas of your page. An area of 600 x 400 on one of my blogs shows 96% of viewers would see everything.
Increase that to 1024 x 600 and it plummets to 19%! You can then tweak ad placement to ensure that they are seen by as many users as possible. The important point is that they are not reporting screen resolution (which Google Analytics already reports) but the statistics on the sizes of the browser window. With the sites I run, over 70% of users are at 1024×768 resolution but they may have the browser window set much smaller.
There are several other very useful features including a hover-over mode where you can see the percentages changing as you move the mouse around. You can also change colour and position to suit sites with different layouts or dark colour schemes. Obviously each site that installs it provides more data for everyone else.
There are both Free and Pro versions of the site. With the Free version, the data you see comes from FoldSpy sites all over the world; with FoldSpy Pro, you also get direct access to data collected on your site, which means the results are tailored to your particular audience. They have focused on building up the screen measurement data since launch but expect to do a marketing push on the Pro version in mid November.
This is one of those well-designed useful utilities that every web developer should have in their arsenal. It has made me think twice about the screen expansion we were going to do on one of our sites.