Optimizing your website can be tough business since you can’t “see” your customers online. Analytics packages like Google analytics do a good job letting you see how many visitors are coming and going on your site by tracking every page request. However, another breed of analytics focuses on optimizing how they’re using it, by tracking where visitors click. Crazy Egg, one of these optimization services, now has a new feature “Confetti” that lets you easily see where every visitor clicked on your site and what brought them there. We’ve covered their previous overlay and heatmap features here. Confetti overlays your site, showing each visitor’s click as a colored dot. The colors stand for the categories you sort the clicks by: operating system, browser, window size, time before clicking, and what search term brought them to the page. It even shows you clicks that weren’t on links, so you know if your users are expecting a link where there isn’t one. You can see the results in aggregate as a bar chart or click on individual dots to find out more information about a particular user. For instance, you can use Confetti to see how users from different referrals behave, and settle the debate over exactly how many of those Digg users click on your ads. Crazy Egg has been implemented on over 250,000 sites and is free if you just want to track up to 5,000 clicks on 4 pages at a time each month. But if you upgrade to a paid account, you can track more clicks over more pages with real time data. The limited number of clicks tracked may seem restrictive, but analytics from Crazy Egg are meant to run for a short period of time on a specific url to grab a sample of how your users react to design changes. There are a couple other optimization services out there: Map Surface, ClickTale, and Click Density. Click Density was one of the first services to show each unique click on your site, but Crazy Egg has added a simpler point-and-click interface for drilling into your data. Crazy Egg is based in Orange County California and has reportedly been in acquisition talks. → Read More
Standard web statistic packages compete based on who can offer the most statistics, the most colorful graphs and trying to wrap usability around all that information. The guys at Crazy Egg have taken a different approach where you can measure and actually see what your users are doing when they visit your site, and from these results you can immediately optimize your site based on your visitors usage patterns. The result is that you can learn a lot more about your visitors from a lot less information that is found in analytics packages. Installing Crazy Egg to track your site is a simple 2 step process, the first step is to tell your app your sites URL, so it can grab a copy of it, and the second step is to insert a javascript code snippet into your site which it will give you. The interface to all this is very simple and intuitive. Once you are setup you wait a few minutes and then the statistics will start flowing back to Crazy Egg. The best way to show what it does, since my words will not do it justice, is with a screenshot The above screenshot shows the heat overlay, which is where users are clicking and focusing their attention. Other parts of the application will show you where users click, and how many times. Crazy Egg plans to launch in April and already has 4000 beta visitors signed up. There will be a free option which will be based on the number of visitors per month (the free option is likely to be up to 5000 visitors) and then paid options if your site has more visitors. Crazy Egg was developed by a team of 5 people based around the USA over the past few months, and the interface for the statistics is all client-side Javascript, with RubyOnRails in the backend. They have been self-funded to date but are exploring funding possibilities as well as potential partnerships (they are looking for distributors). The aim of Crazy Egg is for webmasters and site owners to learn from visitor usage patterns and improve their site based on what they learn from the application, as opposed to having page after page of statistics. Some features currently in development will allow users to track ad performance so that ad campaigns can be refined, RSS integration and demographic information of your visitors (filtering → Read More
