A new service launched Monday called Crazyegg that promises to give website owners 5,000 free page visits with a detailed click heat map of what those visitors clicked on up to two pages. If you want to pay more then you can receive more views and more pages:

FREE = 5,000 page visits, 2 page tracking
(standard) $19/month = 25,000 page visits, unlimited pages tracking, archive 20 snapshots
(plus) $49/month = 100,000 page visits, unlimited pages tracking, archive 50 snapshots
(pro) $99/month = 250,000 page visits, unlimited pages tracking, archive 100 snapshots

If we were to use this service across all pages at Hmm we’d need the $99/month plan. As of this writing Site Meter shows Hmm is serving an average of 3,503 pages per day which works out on a 30 day cycle to 105,090 page views. Our server stats which is what we pay bandwidth on show a figure that is just around 5,000 page views a day across the site. I think we’d still be able to fit under the quarter million page views mark, although traffic has risen rather dramatically the last couple months (which is a good thing so please don’t take this as any sort of complaint, thank you and welcome new readers and subscribers).

I’m not sure what Crazyegg does for accounts with more than 250,000 page views a month, does anybody know? Tell them to get multiple accounts? Work out a private deal? Guess that would be a good problem for a webmaster to have, wouldn’t it?

Day 1
It seems to have been opening launch day Crazy Egg jitters because I found their create test page function frustrating. It crapped out multiple times with a game show failure sound that blared through my speakers (no warning music on page is a baaaaaaad practice) and gave me a message that tech support had been mailed.

But the test on may pages started running anyway as if everything was ok. It wasn’t ok since I didn’t have the code on the page to track.

It’s step number two where you actually receive the necessary code to copy and paste to the page(s) you want to track. So I kept trying to restart the test to not receive that error throughout the error and last night finally around 11pm PST it worked. Unfortunately, it now shows two tests and one that has been running longer than the other. I don’t see how or where to delete the first test. The time was wrong on the second test but that seemed to have been fixed after they did some egg unscrambling.

And that’s not me joking around there was actually an image of an egg beater and those words.

In a word the launch was messy. Like it is when I’m in a hurry and cooking with eggs. Definitely not something that enticed me to reach for my wallet and buy more visits.

Day 2
Depending on when you read this, if you look at the homepage of this blog, I nervously added the code only on that page down near the closing BODY tag and plan to keep it there for a week or so which is about how long it should take to burn up the 5,000 free page views for the homepage. As I write this, about 24 hours later it shows 743 visits and 80 clickthrus on the homepage.

Most of the information gleaned from the heatmap has already been learned through following the site stats but there have been a couple enlightening moments. My notes overall:

- the most clicked areas on the homepage are the search and the post comment links with numbers (showing that a number of 1 comment or more draws interest), readers are clearly interested in reading what others have to say. I’ve written several times before about search being one of the most important tools on a blog for readers. The heatmap and my stats on search further supports this importance. Keep the site search somewhere above the scroll and easy to find and it will help keep readers on your blog longer.
- I’m surprised by the number of clicks on images that aren’t clickable. I don’t usually make the pictures inside posts clickable, but several pictures have been clicked as if they would lead to larger pictures. I’m going to start linking more of those pictures. Can’t get much bigger than 450 pixels on the homepage due to the three columns.
- the 468×60 banners at the top of the homepage doesn’t generate many clicks. I already know the number of clickthrus for these banners is low, but the number of conversions to sales is high. I suspect part of the reason is regulars tune the banners out in their current location or use tools that block the banners from being displayed. I could move these banners to verticals or use awkward sizes as I’ve done in a few of the categories and that does generate more clickthrus, but the ratios stay about the same.
- the top most category is clicked the most (Hmmcast in this case). If you have a long list of categories and want to highlight one of them, then move it to the top instead of leaving in its alphabetical location. It can also add additional clicks adding the word “new” or “updated” in front in a different color or a small icon.
- the main categories beneath the banner aren’t clickable but some folks are clicking those too. I do have a version of the site design where those are rollover images that change colors and are clickable but have never used it. It’s a prime piece of virtual real estate so I might change this code at some point.

If alternating between “views” and “visits” is confusing blame me. Crazy Egg actually calls these “visits” but it sure seems more like raw stats to me than unique. Crazy Egg doesn’t say whether it is unique or raw. I’d have to test on a different blog to see if by refreshing the page I could increment the crazyegg page counter. My guess is a visit is not unique, it’s raw, which means the same person clicking around and revisiting the page with the code is going to bang the counter multiple times. I hope this isn’t the case as unique visitors would be more useful information to track than raw.

I’ll be curious to see what the Crazyegg heat map looks like once the whole 5,000 visits are logged. The limitation on site traffic reminds me of Visitorville (affiliate) which I reviewed back in June 2004. It’s a traffic tracking service that displayed visitors in real time graphically and you could even invoke a live chat with them. I didn’t experiment with the chat part very much because I figured I’d freak out visitors by communicating with them in real time while surfing the site.

Crazyegg gets a D- for execution. The site was pretty much unusable the first day and still moves too slowly a couple days later. It is improving as I imagine many folks have given up and moved on or they’ve added enough servers to handle the load. The heatmap provides some useful information and I like how they’ve laid things out with that part of the service. The configuration and UI on the site could use some more refinement. I like the concept and see some potential here. Grade: C

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