Design / Usability

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Analyze Visitor Clicks on Your Site with Crazy Egg Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Editor-in-Chief Web Marketing Today, Rocklin, CA - May 15, 2007

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Detail of CrazyEgg.com display in "heatmap" mode.

If you can figure out what people are trying to do on your webpage, you can optimize the page to help them to do it better. Traffic analysis programs such as Google Analytics and especially ClickTracks are irreplaceable. But I've discovered CrazyEgg.com (www.crazyegg.com), a new free tool that gives you an utterly unique view of your customer clicks. It "maps" every time a customer clicks on whatever webpage you decide to test. You can get a free account that will track up to 5,000 clicks per month -- plenty for smaller businesses. Crazy Egg displays these clicks in three ways:

In overlay mode you can drill down to see the source of clicks for each element.

Overlay Mode shows a colored circle with a plus-sign inside that appears next to each clickable item on your page. The color of the button indicates the relative number of clicks: red is high, green is medium, blue is low. When you click on the plus sign, it expands so you can view the number of clicks and the percentage this represents of total clicks on the page. When you click "more," you can drill down to see the actual source of traffic to your page that clicked on this particular link.

List Mode shows in table form the number of clicks for each element in descending order. This can be exported in CSV format for spreadsheet analysis.

Heatmap Mode displays the clicks using a heatmap display. This is the kind of display used in eyetracking studies, but here the brightest areas mean that more visitors clicked in those areas.

Free gets you a lot, but for a very modest monthly fee you can get not only more clicks, but also the ability to share results with clients (without them being able to mess up your demonstrations). Additionally, paid subscribers are able to view other areas on your webpages where visitors are clicking that aren't clickable links . This might help you identify what visitors expect to happen on your page so you can modify it to meet expectations. Fees are modest: $9 for 10,000 clicks/month, $19 for 25K, $49 for 100K, and $99 for 250K. It's a low investment for some great potential insights with no long-term contracts.

Crazy Egg isn't perfect, of course. For example, it shows clicks in form fields and submit buttons, but doesn't indicate how many submitted the form by pressing their enter key. Nor does it track Flash or Ajax applications -- yet. Fortunately, the tool is under rapid and continuous development so new features will be available soon.

While I set this up to view activity on my homepage, it could be of special aid in optimizing positions of graphics and text on a landing page. Since you can track visitor activity by source, Crazy Egg also helps you learn how visitors from different sources and different search keywords behave. Crazy Egg gives you some insightful and very visual ways to increase conversion rates. Highly recommended.