Tracking site usage in Google Analytics is great. Tracking goals are great. But when you’re evaluating the performance of a page, sometimes the best consideration is visual, not numerical. That’s where Crazy Egg comes in.
Crazy Egg is crazy simple.
Enter your page URL, put a lightweight JavaScript block before the
What do you get from it?
Once you’ve received a reasonable amount of traffic, you have a number of reports available to help you visually (and numerically, if you really need the numbers) analyze how folks are interacting with your page(s):
Their heat mapping is second to none. Not only does it track elements with links on the page, it also tracks clicks on images, non-linked text and elements generated by scripts.
Ever wonder how many people scroll down to the farthest reaches of your pages? Ever wonder where they stop and focus? Ever wonder what they skip by? Scrollmap will show you. And the answers may surprise you.
Overlay is my personal favorite. Color-coded buttons that combine the visual elements of cold to hot performance and the sheer number of clicks to each element when you hover over the button.
And if the visual evidence isn’t quite enough for you, get the raw data – also available in a .csv download format.
So, how much will this hurt your pocketbook? Not much at the lowest level. And not much at the highest level depending on what you need it for:
If you’re a blog owner wanting to test some landing pages, $9/month really isn’t a ton of money to get this valuable analysis on up to 10 pages.
If you’re a marketing manager at an agency, $99/month isn’t a ton of money to get this valuable analysis on up to 100 pages.
A-R Verdict
Crazy Egg has been an old standby at Portent. A client asked us the other day to see if the navigation on their landing page was distracting too many folks from taking the desired action. There’s no more elegant way to show them than Heatmapping.
Get in at whatever price level you can afford, because this tool is irreplaceable for landing page optimization.
We’ve shown clients how many potential clicks they’re losing by leaving their landing page images unlinked. We’ve also shown clients just how far a user will scroll and read down that long-format lander they thought was insane. Even see just how many clicks each element in a sign-up form receives.
Crazy Egg needs to be a part of your analytics repertoire.
Dajok3r says:
I’ve used CrazyEgg with a number of different clients and have found that it very quickly can highlight different usability problems across sites versus using only traditional analytics tools (Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, etc.).
From being able to see what particular piece of a promotional banner users were clicking on, to what elements on the page users were clicking on that weren’t actually clickable; these are things the big label platforms simply cannot easily tell you in such a visually easy-to-digest manner (confetti view is my favorite actually).
My only complaint about CrazyEgg (and it’s more about heat-mapping tools in general) is how they can’t easily be used on pages that have quite a few elements changing position dynamically, such as on search result pages. You can of course tailor the heat map to the page with some custom coding, but that removes much of the ease from using the tool. In those cases, I usually fall back on Clicktale.com user recordings – which can certainly be informative, but overly tedious to review in the long term. Just another tool in the proverbial toolbox I suppose.
Michael Wiegand says:
Yeah, I totally agree. When I’m doing multivariate testing or using dynamic elements, I’m usually tracking those as sections of a Google Website Optimizer or Optimizely test.
CrazyEgg is really more for static pages, in my opinion.