I’ve been testing the Crazy Egg script for a couple of months, but really haven’t been able to see its true power. Starting a new destination website can take quite awhile before any hits occur and more importantly, visits and clicks. For those that don’t know, hits can be something as simple your site being referenced by a search engine which doesn’t necessarily mean a visit. Crazy Egg measures visits and shows you clicks. To quote their header:
Track, Evaluate, and Improve your site. Get a clear picture of where your visitors are clicking and enhance your site’s results.
Sign up for a free account, configure your tracker, install the script into your page, upload to your server and you’re live! They really make it that easy. The only caveat is that the free account is limited to 5,000 visits, 4 tracked pages, 4 archived snapshots, and no live reports. I’m poor, so I can’t afford the paid luxury at the moment, but as things hopefully heat up here, I may upgrade to the standard plan. It would be nice if there was another plan between the free and the $19 Standard version. I’d pay a little just to to get a few more pages tracked. I don’t necessarily need to archive a lot of pages nor do I need to view live reports. Something for them to think about for the future, but the service is so nice that I imagine that most go straight to the Standard plan.
So once things are running and you’re getting some visits and clicks (thanks to all in the Screen Design class!) you begin to see the power and benefit of this app. If you own your own server space you’ve probably looked through your site’s metrics to see the hit numbers. Like I said above this program tracks visits and clicks but it shows you where they’re clicking, and what pages they’re trending to. They give you 3 screen shots: one showing click counts for your various page links, another (my favorite) showing you a heatmap of where the clicks strike on the page surface, and the third gives you a list of all the clicks that shows you what format your link is in (ie. anchor, image, etc.).
The first is nice to see which pages are the most visited, but the second is great for tweaking your screen design and usability. You can see where on the global menu people like to click, you can also see if visitors are clicking on areas they think should be a hyperlink. Already you can see how invaluable this app can be. In case you’re wondering, I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t track your own clicks from computers where your account is registered. I already tried. Well what do you expect, I wanted to see how it works and I was impatient…
As w/ any plug-in script it has to load every time your page is accessed so you always have the possibility of it hanging, but so far I’ve seen no delays yet from this one. It’s nice that it sits at the very end of your page so everything above will be on the screen already if anything was to happen.
It’s free, so why not give a try.
Technorati Tags: design, web design, screen design, Crazy Egg, site metrics, web 2.0
