CrazyEgg: Measuring Website Tendencies

Back on March 4th, I mentioned Crazyegg.  Little did I know that observing it’s existence would set me on a path to be offered a private beta of the service.  Crazyegg is a twist on your average webstats program.  It doesn’t offer the full quota of stats that say, a Performancing Metrics does, but the visual representation of how website visitors use your site is really quite nice.  The difference therein lies in how Crazyegg measures statistics.  It works off of clicks and not page impressions.

Crazy Egg Kicks Ass

Crazyegg works on sessions.  For instance, if you choose to run a one week campaign to sell a certain product or run a specialized marketing campaign.  Currently the session is 14 days which seems kind of short to me – but this is a beta product.  I would personally like to see ongoing stat collection.  To me this limitation seems to be the one thing that is going to stick in the craw of most users.

One you’ve logged into your session, there are three different display modes: Overlay, List and Heatmap.  Each shows a different representation of the data collected over the period of your session.

Overlay mode provides a clean representation of your site with clicked links highlighted with cartoonish (Web 2.0-ish) looking plus-sign icons.  This trend among Web 2.0 companies to use such common colors (bright green, orange, electric blue – with slight gradients) and techniques (caricature fonts, images, etc) is something akin to trendwhoring, but I won’t hold it against them – they can’t help it!

Clicking on one of these icons displays a "meter-looking" chart with helpful information like how many clicks to the link, what percentage of the total clicks collected went to that link, etc.  Fairly useful.

The next mode available for users is a little confusing. I sent an email to Crazyegg requesting an explanation and though they responded, I’m not sure they know how to manage this data.  The data provided is a list representation of all the clicks but it collects some very strange data and the color coding used is not readily identifiable as to what it means. All I can think is Crazyegg thinks some links are more important that others, but even that theory has holes in it.

The most useful and intriguing mode, though, is the heatmap.  The heatmap actually shows visually the hotspots of a blog.  This would be particularly useful for people who want to measure how well their ads were performing or how a particular keyword was attracting clicks.

Now for the Bad

Crazyegg is an amazing little application but it has a long way to go.  I expect it will improve dramatically before launch in April or May (as I’m told). I have a problem with the fact that it is a hosted application. I think it could get more mileage (and support more features) if it was offered as a javascript package that someone could install on their own blog.  I also don’t really care to have my traffic details shared with a third party.

There’s also a little problem with freshness of the overlay.  The snapshot of my site that is being used in the current report is from 12 days ago!  That’s not keeping up with the joneses and another good argument for a self-hosted app.

I’m excited to see where Crazyegg goes. It’s got a lot of potential.

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