How to Improve Your Website and Increase Conversions with Crazy Egg

Icons • ResourcesCarrie Cousins • February 25, 2014 • 5 minutes READ

We are all looking for ways to get more users to visit our sites and click around, right? Of course we are.

But how can you make it happen?

Tools like Google Analytics are a great starting point but there are some other tools out there that can show us an even deeper level of data and offer suggestions for UX tweaks that can actually help increase conversions. Today, we are going to look at one such tool from Crazy Egg, and explain how it works and how it could benefit you and your website.

Why Data is Important

Every good design is typically backed by some research. You know that certain colors can help draw the attention of users or that big type will catch someone’s attention first, but just how significant can those design techniques be?

That’s where the heat mapping tool from Crazy Egg comes in. This kind of tool allows you to see – yes, it collects data visually – what users are interacting with. It tracks data such as clicks, hotspots on each page of your website, the depth of user scrolls and links clicks to traffic type.

All of this information can help you design and build a site that focuses on the things your visitors want, resulting in increased conversions and time on site.

As a designer, this kind of data can help you validate your design choices. Are users moving from element to element on the site in the way you intended? Are they clicking on buttons and using the navigation tools to dive deeper into the website? Data collection can answer many of these questions and better help you arrange components on your website.

Data Collection

The data collection tools from Crazy Egg are robust and easy to use. The basic idea is that the tool collects data in the form of a heat map. A heatmap is an easy way to understand what users want, care about and do on your site by visually representing their clicks, according to Crazy Egg, which are the strongest indicators of visitor motivation and desire. But that’s not the only data you can collect with this tool. Here are the options:

Heat map: A heat map lets you collect more than 88 percent of the data you would using a traditional eye-tracking process. This visual data representation shows you, using color blotches, where users are most likely to land on your page. This give you an idea of what works (and does not) and what content you should keep, increase or remove from your site.

Click-tracking overlay: The overlays turn hot spots from the heat map into real numbers, showing you the percentage of visitors that click something on the site. This can give you an idea if the look, placement or text inside a button is working and encouraging users to act in some way.

Scroll map: A scroll map does exactly what you might think. It shows you how deep into your site users actually go. It answers the question: Do users scroll anymore? (Well, it varies by site.) Knowing where users end scrolling behaviors can help you plan the depth and design of pages on your site (and whether scrolling actions are working for you).

Confetti: This fun feature connects traffic sources and behavior, so you can see where visitors come from and what they did when they arrived to the site. (It helps answer questions such as “do Facebook users really buy our products?”)

Benefits of This Tool

Tracking data is one of the real emerging tools in website design and development. With tools such as this one by Crazy Egg, you can actually get proof of what is working on your site.

So what should you do with data from a tool like this? How can you actually use it in your every day design process?

It can be a guideline to help you create design concepts. From user experience to color choice, know what makes users click really will help you make better informed visual choices. It can also help you identify visual clutter and things on your site that are just being ignored. Removing these types of on-site distractions can result in a cleaner, leaner design.

Learn what users interact with. Do users actually watch that video on your site? Data is a great way to determine if some of your design tricks are actually working. What many people find is that some unexpected elements can be the most popular for users.

Provide data for your company or investors. Back up the benefits and usability of your site with numbers when you are talking to clients, managers or investors. If your site is working, a tool like this can help you prove it.

Logistics and Specifications

Now that you are interested, how does Crazy Egg actually work?

Crazy Egg is a web-based tool that you can set up for your site in less than a minute. There is no hardware and most users can do it without the assistance of IT staff. Register an account and paste a line of code to your website.

It is being used by a good number of big, trusted companies for data collection and research and it is actually affordable enough for almost any small company as well.

Crazy Egg plans starts at $9 per month and includes all of the features above. (Plus, Crazy Egg will let you test it all out for 30 days free.) The pricing structure is based on monthly pageviews and number of active pages on your site. The top-tier plan is $99 per month for 250,000 pageviews. Some of the top packages include a few extra features as well, such as mobile heat mapping, a priority phone and email support.

SPECIAL OFFER: Designmodo readers can try Crazy Egg for 90 days free (instead of the typical 30) with this special link.

Conclusion

For a tool that is this easy to use and this affordable, Crazy Egg is tough to beat. It is adaptable for almost any website, from the smallest startup to a major corporation, and provides essential data that can help you improve your site.

The data you can collect can help you increase conversions, improve your user experience, better design your site for visitors and continue to improve the look and feel of your website. Crazy Egg is definitely worth a try,