Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Marketing Tool Review: Crazy Egg

When I first started blogging I came across an analytics tool called Crazy Egg. I saw that it was free and decided to take it on a test drive. It has been almost 2 months now and I have to say that its a pretty neat tool and has some cool features - however because of its simplicity I would not use it as my lone solution for analytics.

Crazy Egg is marketed primarily as a testing tool. This can be misleading for those looking for a real testing solution ala Offermatica or Website Optimizer (Google's free tool). If you are looking for a way to do complex multivariate splits do not turn here - it does not handle content serving.

What Crazy Egg does allow you to do is to set up simple tests within the application where a specified number of visitors are tracked per page. Once that number of visitors is reached the test completes and stats are recorded for the test. The next step is to make a change to the page and run another test - typically with the same visitor count. This is supposed to provide insight as to what is working and what you may wish to change.

So if you want to conduct some simple(and manual) tests this tool will work fine.

Crazy Eggs biggest asset is that it is simple to follow for those who do better understanding visually (I am one of them). Crazy Egg has some unique features... the one that I found to be the most interesting is the heat map. It tracks where in a web page user clicks are being recorded and visually displays the results over the web page itself. This is rather interesting data and could be used to better understand your visitor behavior.

The biggest drawback for me is that you cannot use this tool with a true testing application. If you are using Google Website Optimizer doing concurrent split/multivariate tests then Crazy Egg is not useful. Crazy Egg does its tracking at the page level which gets muddy because it shares split level traffic and inconsistent page elements.

But I still like to use Crazy Egg in addition to other testing and analytics tools because of some of its unique features. And if you are new and interested in web page testing then this tool is a great place to start... it is both easy to implement and simple to understand.

Grade: B

Have your own thoughts or experiences with Crazy Egg? Share them!

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Which tool is better, a free or a paid one ? I do read and heard about this tool many times but never used it. This article helped me to learn so much about it. Thanks.
mouse heat map

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