CrazyEgg

What is CrazyEgg?

CrazyEgg is a heatmap and analytics service that you can use to see how visitors interact with your website and your content. CrazyEgg claims to provide you with actionable data that you can use to make your website more engaging, and increase your clicks and conversion rate.

Heatmaps show you levels of user interaction through hot and cold colors. The more people interact with your content, click your button, or hover with their mouse cursor over your text, the lighter the color (white being lightest). The less people interact with your content, the cooler the color, with dark blue being the coolest (or none at all, of course, for content that people don’t even look at).

Like other similar services, CrazyEgg gives you a few lines of Javascript to add to the page, or pages, that you want to track, and you can then see the results of your analytics in an overlay. You’ll need to wait 24 hours before CrazyEgg results kick in, and we recommend that you wait until you have a sizeable number of visits to look at – over 5,000 should be enough.

So what does CrazyEgg give you?

Heatmap

According to their site, the heatmap is “A picture of where people clicked on your site. This lets you see what’s hot and what’s not, so you can make changes that increase conversions. “.

In other words, you can what people are clicking on most in your page, but you can’t see much data behind the heatmap. You can see that a certain button is being clicked, for example, but you can’t see how many times, or who is clicking it. Still, it is very useful to learn what people think they can click on, so you can add hyperlinks to images that might not have them, or move buttons from disregarded areas into areas that your visitors interact with.

You can also compare results – meaning you can see two landing pages with their respective hotspots, so that you can see which is performing better, and where the clicks are going on each page.

Scrollmap

From their site “The scrollmap shows how far down the page people are scrolling and helps determine where visitors abandon the page.Now you’ll know exactly where to add elements to hold a visitor’s interest longer.”

Not very surprisingly, the further down the page you go, the less people will see the content that is there, with the most action usually taking place just above the fold (the bottom border of your screen). You can see the results according to a color overlay that is placed over your site, and you can see the colors changing as people spend more, or less, time on that particular area of the page.

As with the heatmaps, you can compare two snapshots side by side, and you can see which page content is performing better.

Confetti

According to their site, “With confetti, you will be able to distinguish all the clicks you get on your site segmented by referral sources, search terms & more. Once you know where your most valuable click traffic is coming from, you’ve uncovered the exact traffic sources that bring high revenue with little effort.”

This is one of the more useful features of CrazyEgg. You can see clicks on your website buttons, links and anywhere on the page, filtered by referral (by default). Why is this awesome? Because you can see that everybody who comes in via Google Search goes straight to your ‘About’ page, while everyone who came in through the newsletter link goes right to your ‘Pricing’ page, and Facebook traffic goes to look at what features you have to offer.

That’s not all – you can filter the clicks by search terms, browser, Google Analytics campaign, or variables that you set up yourself. So you can see exactly what content works best for each specific audience, or what content doesn’t work – say, Flash content for Android-based browsers – and adapt accordingly.

When you post a guest blog post, or link back to your website from other sites, this is an excellent way to see if the traffic you are getting is the traffic you are looking for.

Overlay

As the CrazyEgg site says, “When you look at the overlay report, you will be able to see the number of clicks on each element of your page. Now you can work on getting more of the clicks that make you money (and less of the ones that don’t).”

The Overlay feature enables you to see detailed information about links being clicked. You can see the number of times that each link was clicked, the percentage of clicks received of the page’s total, and again, you can break down this information into what referral traffic clicked the link the most.

Pricing Plans

The pricing plan is pretty simple, ranging from $9 a month to $99, but be aware that the payment is ANNUAL – once you finish your 30-day free trial, you will be billed for the entire year, and you won’t be able to cancel the service.

Pros:

  • Cheap

  • Offers lots of data per link

  • Has tons of filtering options

Cons:

  • Takes snapshot of site when trial starts, so isn’t effective tracking dynamic content like blog posts

  • Annual billing