In this month’s SiteBeat, the MightyMerchant newsletter, we made the case for Crazy Egg (www.crazyegg.com) being a useful analytical tool, a supplement to Google Analytics. Crazy Egg is a visual stats monitoring tool that lets you see at a glance where people click on your website. But you may be wondering just how you can put its features to use.
The primary difference between GA and Crazy Egg, other than the fact that GA is much more comprehensive, is that GA reports stats on a per-URL basis whereas Crazy Egg reports stats on a per-coordinate basis. So GA looks at everything on your homepage as one URL and reports clicks on that page. Crazy Egg overlays their stats visually onto your home page, with each point on the homepage treated as an individual coordinate. To revisit the concrete example we gave in the newsletter, if you have a clickable text link that says, “download the free trial”, people may respond to that differently than a download button. With Crazy Egg, you get to see the number of people who clicked on the text link as opposed to the button. With GA, the clicks on each will be reported together and you won’t know which is more of a draw.
Here are some more ways Crazy Egg can be utilized:
Take two different images of the same product. Switch out the images for a couple of weeks at a time and see if one is noticeably more effective.
Write two different text blurbs for the same product, and after trying each one for a couple of weeks, you should be able to tell if one more effectively gets clicks. Test what happens if you include all of the product info or add a “read more” button.
Add an additional “subscribe” button in another location, and see which one results in more sign-ups. Do people prefer a button or a link?
Use it to test ad placement, to find out which ads generate interest and which don’t. You can see which ads are being clicked on and exactly where people are clicking on the ad. Do banner ads fare better than other forms? This will tell you.
Find out how many people use a search feature, click on FAQ’s, or use navigation features in general. Used in conjunction with Google Analytics, this knowledge can help you remove navigational stumbling blocks from your site. (See our article entitled “Successful Home Page Design – Secrets of a Sticky Website” here.)
If you have form fields with submit buttons, you can find out how many people click on your form fields versus the amount of people that actually hit the submit button. This can tell you if you need to modify your forms.
Find out where people expect to be able to click. Do people click on the image, headline, or “more” link? Sometimes, people will click where you never intended them to be able to click. Armed with this information, you could modify your site to give visitors what they expect.
You could monitor the appeal of colors, layout, font, images, text, anything that involves the visual layout of your site, and see exactly where people clicked. It’s all about optimizing site navigation, which means more conversions for you.
