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OK sometimes I am just stubborn, I heard all the blogs buzzing about Crazy Egg after they were on Webmaster Radio but I just did not see the point.  I just wondered what could this possibly show me that Google Analytics would not?  Well apparently a lot, but more to the point I can get data I want with a lot less work.

Let me explain, note the cut out of a screen shot from this blog to the right.  Notice what is heat mapped is my Disclosure Policy.  Yet we see a lot more then people are clicking there!  You see exactly WHERE people are clicking on those links.  

Like in the upper one they are clicking on the word Disclosure mostly, where as on the lower one they are clicking all the way to the right.

Now that is cool, I am not totally sure how practicle it is but it is cool. 

Now let's be practicle, I don't really care what part of my link you click on but what I do care about is if I have two links on the same page that both point to the same location, which one users are actually using.  What I mean is this, if I look in Analytics at the site overlay it will tell me that the same number of people clicked on both links.  So I know the target page is being viewed but not how people are getting there.

In this case both links are getting used so I would want to leave them both intact.  But let's say I am doing some marketing with a goal to get people to go through a process.  Now on that first page of the process I have two links a person might use to take the same step, wouldn't it be nice to know if one got used and the other did not?  Wouldn't that make improving my page easier?

How do I do this with Analytics?  It is a pain, what I have to do is create a tracking id for both links, like www.domain.com/target?1 and www.domain.com/target?2 then my overlay in Analytics can see the difference.  That lets me split test layouts and make good judgements on tweaks.  Of course it is a pain in the butt so I don't always take the step like I should.

Conversely setting up a Crazy Egg project takes about 25 seconds and pasting one line of code.  You then know exactly how your landing pages are being used.  On top of this you can get a lot of use out of their free version so there is not much to loose by giving it a try.  You can run 4 tests at the same time with up to 5,000 monthly page views for free and that gets a lot of data for you. 

This is not like a typical program you run non stop on all your pages, you just put in on one page, set the duration of your test and run it long enough to get your answers.  Give it a shot, I can promise you that you will learn things about your sites you never even knew to ask about.

~  Jack Spirko

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