Regardless of the global economic uncertainty, online advertising is not going anywhere.
Why? One word: analytics.
Television and radio content will never be as measurable as web content, and measurability is the key to selling advertising. While there are not as many web analytics packages on the market as there are blogging platforms, there is certainly a wide range of choices. Ranging from free to extremely expensive, the fact remains that accurate and reliable analytics are a must for every owner of an online presence.
Measurability is Important, But so is Usability
Only slightly less important than the ability to track your users, or more important depending on who you ask, is the ability for users to actually use your site. What we are talking about is usability, and this is where Crazy Egg comes in.
As we described in our initial coverage of Crazy Egg's launch, this particular Software-as-a-Service is intended to supplement an existing web analytics solution. Traditional web analytics products, such as WebTrends or Google Analytics, are great at telling you things like your most popular page or how long a user stayed on your site.
These same products struggle to show how users interact with your site and what said users are actually clicking on. Crazy Egg's three main capabilities are intended to close this gap and provide a visual representation of these precious clicks.
Crazy Egg Features
- Heatmap: Just because you think a certain element of your homepage is hot, doesn't mean anyone else shares the sentiment. This heatmap provides a picture of what your users are clicking on.
- Confetti: Think of this as a heatmap under a microscope. The "Confetti" view allows you to learn what kind of traffic (e.g. which site visitors) clicked which advertisements.
- Overlay: Arguably the most valuable view, "Overlay" is similar to "Confetti" except that it is cleaner and more usable with each page of your site being overlaid with usage information.
Along with these three visual representations of the data, there is also a straightforward list view along with reporting and notification capabilities.
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Don't Let the Pretty Pictures Kill Your Site's Performance
It is easy to say that adding Crazy Egg's data collection functionality to your site will not impact performance. But our experience has shown that a little bit of JavaScript goes a long way. If you are already using multiple third-party tracking services, we caution you to think twice before adding another.
A more appropriate strategy is to swap Crazy Egg in for one of your other services for a limited time -- like a week or a month -- at least until you have gathered the data you need. Then, Crazy Egg's JavaScript can be pulled off your pages in lieu of the previous service.
How Much Does it Cost?
When we originally covered Crazy Egg, there was still a free offering providing up to 6000 page views. The latest release of the service has done away with that plan, but if you signed up early on you will be grandfathered in. There are four standard plans as shown:
The "new" Crazy Egg has also joined the social media revolution. The company started Twittering in November, and they are using it for the right reasons: customer service and knowledge sharing.
While the loss of the free trial plan is disappointing, we are in support of anything that improves the usability of websites. If you would like to know more about how people are using your website, we encourage you give Crazy Egg a try.