Field Review of Crazy Egg
By now almost everyone has read about the launch of the Crazy Egg web analytics tool. So here is my preliminary 1-week review of implementing and using this tool on my own website. The website I decided to test it with receives over 100,000 or so impressions a month so if you’re looking for stress testing I haven’t done that yet.
Basics about Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a tool that alows you to track clicks on any page of your website and then displays this click behaviour in a heatmap or list. If you’ve ever used Google Analytics it is similiar to the “site overlay” feature. However there are a couple differences I noticed.
Why Use Crazy Egg
While most webdesigners will never use Crazy Egg and are quite happy with a combination of a live updating stat tracker like Statcounter and a web analytics tool like Google Analytics there is a case to implement Crazy Egg for some web designers. It is as follows:
Design matters
I’ve had Google Analytics running for a long time on all of the websites that I run however I have only made 1 or 2 changes to any of the pages due to information I was able to gather via the “Site Overlay” feature (most comparable to Crazy Egg heatmaps). However within 1 week of using Crazy Egg I’ve already made 3 changes to my homepage. Turns out I’m highly visual and though I already received the same information with Google Analytics the Crazy Egg heatmaps really made it easy to see where and what my users were doing in a general sense. It’s much easier for a visual person to relate user activity and trends with heatmaps and colors than click counts in a bar (site map overlay does this).
Simplicity
The reason I like StatCounter is because they do one thing extremely well and though there are a ton of other features that I can use if I need to check my website stats it is always the first thing displayed on my user profile. If you think in this same sense about Crazy Egg then it works very well. Crazy Egg does heatmaps and tracks clicks, that’s what they do. Often times Google Analytics gives you soo much information (which is good btw) it’s a bit daunting and you end up having so much information that it’s an overload and you don’t do anything. So for simplicity’s sake Crazy Egg gets a thumbs up.
Why not to use Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a feature, that is one thing for sure. A feature done right but a feature none the less. You can get all the same information from Google Analytics along with all your other web analytics tools like keyword tracking, referring URLS, etc. So if you are perfectly happy using Google Analytics and make adjustments to reflect the data you are gathering then don’t bother installing Crazy Egg. It’s just another line of code in your website and will not provide anything that you need, right now. They may develop more functionality but on the other hand Google Analytics may develop heatmaps so it’s up to you.
I’ll give a 1 month review of Crazy Egg after I have used it for that long.
share this story
September 3rd, 2006 at 12:52 am |
Thanks for reviewing Crazy Egg. The idea behind it is the simpe and easy to understand visual representation, plus we are tracking any click on a page which is a strong focus of ours compare to any of the overlay’s that analytics packages currently provide. We are going to be adding some functionality in the future, and look forward to any feedback on what type of things you are looking for.
September 3rd, 2006 at 4:09 am |
Thanks for the response Hiten (Crazy Egg), I think that you all have the makings of a good product. As people share their input I will be sure to let you know the feedback that they give on their experiences with Crazy Egg.