Crazy Egg: The not so rotten egg

Web analytics gives a brand more clarity about the traffic visiting its site as well as the results of an advertising campaign. These analytics also represent the ability for companies to learn about customer behaviors allowing it to take corrective action whenever necessary. By regularly reviewing web analytics, brands have a chance to build an efficient and user-friendly site, therefore, making it easier to communicate a message and increase conversions.

Crazy Egg is an analytics tool that allows users to build heat maps and track visitors’ every click based on where they are specifically clicking within a brand’s website. This platform allows brands to explore what parts of a site that users are finding most interesting and clicking on the most (Walsh, 2013). This is helpful in improving website design and in essence improving the rate of conversion. In theory, by finding out the users click paths, companies can make changes to its site and therefore hopefully be able to create a higher rate of conversions. Metaphorically, Crazy Egg is like a pair of x-ray glasses that lets a person see exactly what people are doing on a specific website.

Once signed into a Crazy Egg account, the first step is to create a snapshot, which is a moment in time for a given page similar to a virtual screenshot (Walsh, 2013). When creating a snapshot, a small code snippet is provided to enable tracking for that given snapshot. It only requires the code to be added to the footer of the site in order for Crazy Egg to begin receiving data.

Crazy Egg is broken into four categories: heat tool map, scroll map tool, overlay tool and a confetti tool.

While Crazy Egg shows which parts of a website’s page visitors click on, Google Analytics will tell a brand manager what links visitors click on. Crazy Egg shows clicks even if the user isn’t on the link. This is displayed as a heat map.  

Crazy Egg shows things that are not clickable. A brand can find that users are clicking on parts of the page that aren’t actually links (Walsh, 2013). This is a good opportunity to reevaluate what should be a link and where those links should be. For example, if a brand discovers that users are clicking on a product photo and nothing currently happens to that photo, he or she might consider making the photo have an action if clicked on. The photo could be magnified or readers could read more information about the product. The heat map tool can also reveal which parts of the page are getting the most attention. This is also very helpful when showing clients data even if they aren’t very experienced in web analytics.

By using confetti, a brand can segment visitors on the basis of keywords, location and referral source. Once a company knows where the most valuable click traffic is coming from, it has uncovered the exact traffic sources that bring high revenue with the least amount of effort.

When analyzing how far visitors scroll down on pages, Crazy Egg provides an easy-to-interpret heat map. It also shows which parts of the page get the most attention based on average viewing time. This tool helps identify which parts of the pages are most important to the visitors and at what point users abandon the page. This tool helps determine exactly where to add elements in order to hold a visitor’s interest longer.

Crazy Egg also differentiates between links to the same page, so a brand will know exactly which parts of a web page work and which don’t, helping analyze which links might be positioned well. This information is available in overlay.

Google Analytics, a product of Google, is a website statics service that generates traffic, conversion and advertising related data (Sharma, 2013). Webmasters commonly use Google Analytics in order to track visitors from different sources including search engines, social media platforms and referral sites.

Although Google Analytics is free to use until a site reaches over 10 million page views per month, Crazy Egg is a paid service with plans starting at $10/month (Walsh, 2013). Small business may very well decide just to use Google Analytics, solely to save on costs, although the use of Crazy Egg simultaneously may provide behavioral information valuable in enhancing a website’s usability.

While Google Analytics provides complete information about all quantitative metrics and dimensions, it does not assist in analyzing the performance of each element a brand’s website has unless a very experienced web analytics team is available. Generally, Google Analytics lacks in visual presentation when it comes to website analytics. Google Analytics also works by placing a JavaScript tag into the code of pages on a website. For websites with many pages, it may be difficult to successfully track every page. Some webmasters are worried that using Google Analytics might also effect page load speed, making its code location undesirable at times (Denyer, 2013).  Google Analytics is also known to update data in a 24-hour cycle, while Crazy Egg boasts of its real time data (Hunsucker, 2009). On the other hand, Google Analytics seems to have more sophisticated segmentation and reports than Crazy Egg.

However, Crazy Egg is much more effective for analyzing user behavior and click patterns. All of the observations and data collected from the tools helps in taking an informed decision about which parts of the website need improvement and which parts are actually bottlenecks in the conversion path. By having a completely different perspective on visitor interactions, Crazy Egg could work well in tandem with Google Analytics but might not be sufficient to replace Google Analytics in totality.

References

Denyer, T. (2013, January 05). Why I removed Google Analytics from my website. Retrieved February 15, 2015, from http://tristandenyer.com/why-i-removed-google-analytics-from-my-website/

Hunsucker, M. (2009, February 20).   Some like it hot Get real-time visual analytics for your site with Crazy Egg. Retrieved February 15, 2015, from http://feedgrowth.com/idea-categories/insights/get-real-time-visual-analytics-for-your-site-with-crazy-egg/

Sharma, A. (2013, December 04). Sorry Google Analytics but CrazyEgg and ClickTale are better! Retrieved February 15, 2015, from http://www.fatbit.com/fab/sorry-google-analytics-crazyegg-clicktale-better/

Walsh, D. (2013, April 22). Incredible Analytics with Crazy Egg. Retrieved February 15, 2015, from http://davidwalsh.name/crazyegg