Crazy Egg

It’s time to get crazy… eggs? I can’t make that joke work. This is a weird-ass name. But, it’s a great website, with a great service and I wholeheartedly recommend that you get your hands on it if you’ve got the spare cash. This isn’t a bread and butter service. Get your SEO, PPC and web optimization in check first. CrazyEgg comes right after with an amazing little tool that you might have heard of before. It’s called a heatmap. They have an extensive platform that has analytics extras and statistical analyses to help you figure out site optimizations, but the heatmap is the core of the product. The heatmap is what you’re paying for.

It’s an intriguing little piece of technology that’s been in use in online marketing for over a decade. It’s pretty common these days, but it’s still not so common that you get it built into your website when you first unpack the damn thing. WordPress has the paid plugin called Inspectlet and in many ways, that’s the main competitor to CrazyEgg. I’m damn sure that most of you are running your sites on WordPress, because you’re busy and time is money. WordPress lets you deploy sites fast. The heatmap you add should ideally be an instant integration. Then, you want the damn thing to dump a ton of information on you and regurgitate it in a way that helps you understand what the fuck is going on.

How Heatmaps Work

It’s simple. When a visitor comes to your site, they move their mouse around. They click things. They stare at things. You want to know exactly what they spend time on. A heatmap analysis software like CrazyEgg gives you a complete breakdown of each user’s session along with aggregate analysis across different users that ends up as an actual colored heatmap in different colors. You figure out which parts of which page are most appealing. Which of them receive the most clicks and which receive the most hovers. Normally, hovers are hard to track, especially when people hover over text in order to read it. They do this subconsciously; it’s not an active interaction. People just like moving the mouse to remind themselves where they’re at and what they’re focusing on.

You’re essentially scalping for that information, while also making sure not to bog down your own website with a hefty plugin. That’s why these kinds of plugins aren’t cheap. It’s also why they always come in tiers that bump you up to multiple analyses at a time. They’ll limit you to a certain amount of visitors or a certain amount of pages. You’ll scan for activity for a month, then sit down and do a careful check through the data to figure out how people interact with your sites.

CrazyEgg Vs Competitors

I think that Inspectlet is the main competitor we should be considering here, since it’s cheaper and offers damn near all of the same tools. I tried to find some customer testimonials to cover the differences, but on the surface, they’re damn near identical in their features. There are differences in volume and pricing. Inspectlet seems to be extremely cheaper, with an actual free tier that lets you use all the features, minus the priority support, which isn’t that crucial if you’re just starting out. If you have two websites running concurrently and you get similar traffic on both, you should definitely A/B test the A/B testing tools. Get your hands on both of these bad boys and compare their effectiveness.

If you don’t have that option, try the free Inspectlet first. Something tells me that there’s more to CrazyEgg than meets the eye. First of all, they’re several years older than Inspectlet. Second, they boast a heftier optimization platform with more data and automated conclusions for optimization. I genuinely can’t figure out which is worth more on surface value alone. This requires testing. I guess you can make the assumption that the more expensive platform is better, especially since they’re older. But, ExpertInsights pits them against each other with the exact same breakdowns per every single category. They’re basically carbon copies. This freaks me out a bit.

The Tiers

Ok, let’s go over these tiers, because they’re expensive as shit and I want to figure out why. First up, we’ve got the $29 a month tier called Basic. At this point, you get 30,000 tracked page views every month. Across up to 100 recordings, you can run unlimited A/B tests, unlimited edits and store all the resulting data for up to 3 months. You can also apply the tool to an unlimited amount of websites, but you’re capped by recordings, so this doesn’t really matter much. At the very least, you can test different websites at the same time. You also miss out on priority support.

All the other tiers are just more expensive variants with more storage and recordings. For $49 bucks, you get 500 recordings and a year of storage with 75,000 tracked page views. Moving up, there’s the $99 per month tier with 150,000 page views and 1000 recordings. The storage also goes up to two years. They say this is their most popular tier. I’ll believe that. One thousand recordings is a lot of data and you shouldn’t feel bottlenecked at that point.

Then, there’s the pro tier at $249 a month, with a whopping 5000 recordings across 500,000 tracked page views a month. Finally, there’s the Enterprise tier, which you have to get a bid for manually. It’s unlimited in every sense of the word except for the storage. You only get two years of it. Other than that, there’s no cap on either page views or recordings. This is the tier you go for if you’re already running an empire and you want to get information on every damn thing that happens on your site with no exception.

The Types of Heatmaps

There’s not a lot of complicated wisdom here. You get three types of heat maps with CrazyEgg. In order, they are the heatmap report, the scroll map report and the confetti report. The first one you should be familiar with. You get images if your site’s different pages with Venn diagram looking colored blobs that show the time spent across different parts of the screen. The scroll map is similar, but it shows you which vertical section of your site was the most popular. Where did people scroll and how long did they stay there? That’s the question that this report answers. Next up, there’s the confetti, which is a smattering of points that were clicked on your site, with how long people spent there before clicking—very simple stuff.

On regular porn tubes, this information is kind of pointless, because people don’t really hover over sections; they hover over videos in order to preview them. This information is useful, sure, but it would be easier to just check out the metrics on the actual videos. You can do this with conventional SEO tools and your standard dump of page popularity. You don’t technically need a heatmap for that. But, if your site has many links across different pages with different sections, you have a lot to learn about your layout. You can also kind of give your design a good consideration in terms of things you can improve.

Finally, there’s the input on shit that shouldn’t be clickable. Shit that shouldn’t look important, but does. You find these little tidbits and scrap them from your site. They’re wasting your time. It’s also worth noting that users are idiots, but so are web developers sometimes. You might be familiar with your site, because you set it up. But, visitors don’t see what you see. It’s their first time on your site. You don’t know what draws their eye—crazyEgg figures that out for you.

It’s a Great Tool

Like I said before, this is an amazing tool that is far from essential. You cover your SEO and PPC first. Make sure you have content to appeal to a wide demographic of people. Rake in the fucking views. Then, you can start thinking about a heatmap to actually get your hands on more in-depth data about these people’s behaviors on your site. In-depth data of a small number of people can be a bit misleading. One hundred people aren’t enough of a sample size to start changing your site for. You want to have several thousands of views in a month to even behind to consider using heat maps.

That being said, if you’ve got the traffic, by all means, pull the trigger. Try CrazyEgg and jump on the optimization train. There’s so much you can improve about your site and you aren’t even aware of it.