Is it necessary for you to understand how visitors are interacting with your web page? Is it helpful for you to know if they are clicking on your logo, navigation, text links, or photos? If so, the following information is valuable to you.
Ideally, you should alter your pages often and engage in continuous testing in order to maximise your results. This is how you will continually improve the performance and conversion rate of your site.
In order to collect this type of visitor data, it will be simpler and more helpful to make use of software that is specialised, as opposed to navigating a huge array of features that are part of an enterprise software application.
If you must determine which web page elements are receiving clicks and compare different page versions with each other, CrazyEgg, is your solution. This relatively simple program only has a couple of functions, but it accomplishes them in an exemplary fashion.
CrazyEgg is very easy to incorporate into your site and use:
CrazyEgg provides you with accurate reporting by allowing you to filter out internal users by simply clicking on a dashboard link or by emailing users that you don’t need to show up in reports. It provides access to data on click streams and web analytics to help you improve your page designs.
• Visit CrazyEgg.com, create an account, and sign up. There is a monthly charge that ranges from $9 to $99, depending on the number of web pages you want to receive data for and the number of monthly visitors to pages you are tracking.
• Place the tracking code in your web page. Paste a JavaScript line in the HTML of pages that you wish to track. This will only take a very brief time to do.
• Wait for visitors to access your site. After a number of visitors have accessed your web pages you can gain access to the data and reports collected by CrazyEgg online. If you choose, information and alerts can be sent via RSS or email.
The reports generated by this system, really make it stand out. There are several very visual reporting mechanisms with which to look at click stream data in a manner that is far more useful than a spreadsheet. For example:
Probably the easiest to visualise, and the most impressive report offered. The heat map uses variations in colour to display the click frequency. The brightest colours signify the most clicks, enabling you to determine very quickly which portions of your page receive the most clicks.
When you click on the [+] associated with each link, it will show you the number of times a link was clicked. Further information is available with the more+ link which will give you the origin of each clicker and the search term that was used, if available. However, Google is not providing search terms any longer, so search term data may be limited.
Displays coloured dots that represent clicks on your links. Each colour is representative of a referring site. This feature is quite useful in order to determine user click patterns from different sources. For instance, visitors that originate from Google may have a different click pattern than visitors from your Facebook advertising campaigns.
If you want to determine which headline works best on a particular landing page, simply make the change and begin a fresh CrazyEgg test. A comparison of the results from both before and after is very simple and a useful comparison.
Many webmasters and agencies are under the impression that methodical testing of shopping carts, landing pages and other key pages is a huge undertaking. It is really not that difficult, and CrazyEgg can assist you in performing this testing and reaping its rewards.
Check out this video to learn more about Crazy Egg: