Friday, August 25, 2006
Crazy Egg Launches to Let You Track User Clicks
byCrazy Egg has been hovering just below the radar for a few months now and finally opened to the public earlier this week. Crazy Egg is another in a growing array of online tools meant to help you understand better how people are using your site. They accomplish this by showing you where users are clicking on your page. They aren’t the only site offering this type of feature, Google Analytics has a similar feature, but they do allow more leeway when configuring your tests, as well as a few options for viewing the collected data.
It was very easy to set up a test as long as you have access to your server and html files. Supply a URL for the page you want to test, a name, set the test parameters (test over a period of time or a certain number of users) and insert a small snippet of code on the page and you’re ready to go. Results begin to show up almost immediately, it can be addicting to keep checking how it is going, particularly if just to look at the groovy heat map visual showing the hotspots. Besides the very visual hot spot report, there are two more traditional looking reports that honestly provide better data if you’re looking for numbers to use instead of slick graphics. If you merely need to impress upon the suits that none of your visitors click the dancing bear holding a flashing sales banner, then the heat map visualization should do the trick.
Crazy Egg is free when testing up to two pages with a limit of 5000 visits per test, which should be fine for any quick tests you’d like to do. Upgraded accounts range from $19 to $99 and increase the amount of traffic you can track per test as well as live reporting of clicks. Free accounts run two hours behind, which again shouldn’t be a problem for anybody running free tests. If live reporting is a must-have, I’d assume you have the $19/month it costs to add it. Crazy Egg is definitely geared toward collecting data when comparing different layouts of the same page, so for many smaller sites and clients, the free account will be more than enough.
The tool Crazy Egg offers is worth using and offers useful data for analyzing site user performance. The only drawback I see is, while you get to see where users click, you don’t get to understand why they clicked there. I wouldn’t want it to be the only tool in my toolbox, but to supplement other site analytic tools, I think it makes a very nice addition. Particularly, if the whiz-bang graphics are apt to impress your clients or bosses, the heat map should knock them on the floor. It might be a one-trick pony, but it works as advertised, sure looks pretty and the cost seems just about right for the value.
